Replication Data for: “Presidential Selection of Supreme Court Nominees: The Characteristics Approach”

Despite the importance of every nomination to the Supreme Court, a unified theory that illuminates presidential selection of nominees across the modern political era remains elusive. We propose a new theory—the “characteristics approach”—that envisions nominees as bundles of characteristics, such as ideology, policy reliability, and attributes of diversity. We formalize the theory, which emphasizes the political returns to presidents from a nominee’s characteristics and the “costs” of finding and confirming such individuals, and derive explicit presidential demand functions for these charac- teristics. Using newly collected data on both nominees and short list candidates, we estimate these demand functions. They reveal some striking and under-appreciated regularities in appointment politics. In particular, the substantial increase in presidential interest in the Supreme Court’s policy output and the increased availability of potential justices with desired characteristics has led to significant changes in appointment politics and the composition of the Court.尽管最高法院的每一项提名都意义重大，但能够阐释现代政治时期总统提名最高法院大法官行为的统一理论，至今仍付阙如。我们提出了一种全新的理论——「特征路径法（characteristics approach）」——将大法官提名人视为一系列特征的集合，例如意识形态、政策可靠性以及多元化属性。我们对该理论进行了形式化建模，该理论着重强调提名人特征为总统带来的政治收益，以及寻觅并确认这类人选所需付出的「成本」，并推导得出了总统针对这些特征的显性需求函数。我们利用新收集的提名人与短名单候选人数据，对上述需求函数进行了估计。估计结果揭示了任命政治中若干引人瞩目却长期未受重视的规律性特征。具体而言，总统对最高法院政策产出的关注度大幅提升，且符合总统预期特征的潜在大法官人选的可得性持续增加，这两大因素共同推动了任命政治以及最高法院组成结构的显著变革。