Replication data for: The Changing Dynamics of Senate Voting on Supreme Court Nominees

A near-universal consensus exists that the nomination of Robert Bork in 1987 triggered a new regime in the Senate's voting over presidential nominees—a regime that de-emphasizes ethics, competence, and integrity and stresses instead politics, philosophy, and ideology. Nonetheless, this conventional wisdom remains largely untested. In this article we explore the extent to which the Bork nomination has affected the decisions of U.S. Senators. To do so, we modernize, update, and backdate the standard account of confirmation politics offered by Cameron, Cover, and Segal (1990) to cover all candidates for the Supreme Court from Hugo Black in 1937 through John Roberts in 2005. Our results confirm conventional wisdom about the Bork nomination but with two notable caveats. First, while the importanc e of ideology has reached new heights, the Senate's emphasis on this factor had its genesis some three decades earlier, in the 1950s. Second, while ideology is of paramount concern to senators, a candidate's professional merit also remains a significant determinant of success in the Senate.

学界几乎普遍认为，1987年罗伯特·博克（Robert Bork）的提名开启了美国参议院对总统提名投票的全新范式：该范式不再强调伦理操守、履职能力与个人正直，转而突出政治立场、哲学理念与意识形态。尽管如此，这一主流共识在很大程度上仍未得到实证检验。本文旨在探究博克提名在多大程度上影响了美国参议员的投票决策。为此，我们对卡梅伦、卡弗与西格尔（Cameron, Cover, and Segal, 1990）提出的最高法院提名政治标准分析框架进行现代化改造、更新，并将其时间范围回溯拓展至1937年雨果·布莱克（Hugo Black）至2005年约翰·罗伯茨（John Roberts）时期的所有最高法院大法官提名候选人。我们的研究结果证实了有关博克提名的主流共识，但存在两项值得注意的限定条件：其一，尽管意识形态的重要性达到了新的高度，但参议院对这一因素的重视早在30年前的20世纪50年代便已初现端倪；其二，尽管意识形态是参议员们最为关注的因素，但候选人的专业素养仍是其在参议院获得提名确认成功的重要影响因素。