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.

尽管最高法院的每项提名均具有重要意义，但目前仍缺乏一套可系统阐释现代政治时期总统提名大法官流程的统一理论。为此，我们提出一种全新理论——「特征分析法（characteristics approach）」，该理论将大法官提名人视为一系列特征的集合，涵盖意识形态、政策可靠性以及多元化属性等维度。我们对该理论进行了形式化建模，其核心着重强调提名人特征可为总统带来的政治收益，以及物色并确认此类人选所需付出的「成本」，并推导出总统针对这些特征的显性需求函数。我们依托新收集的最终提名者与短名单候选人的相关数据，对上述需求函数进行了估算。估算结果揭示了司法任命政治领域中若干引人关注且长期未被充分认知的规律。具体而言，总统对最高法院政策产出的关注度大幅提升，加之符合总统预期特征的潜在大法官人选日益增多，这两大因素共同推动了司法任命政治格局与最高法院人员构成的显著变化。