Confirmation Hearings and the Influence on the Public (More on the Gibson and Caldeira Paper)
Last week, I briefly blogged in the academic round-up about Gibson and Caldeira’s outstanding paper entitled “Supreme Court Nominations, Legitimacy Theory, and the American Public: A Dynamic Test of the Theory of Positivity Bias,” see here. The paper can be downloaded here. To recap, Gibson and Caldeira use a three-wave national survey of Americans to determine their views on the Supreme Court before the Alito confirmation hearings (time 1), during the hearings (time 2), and then after the hearings (time 3). In the study, Gibson and Caldeira continue the interview process with the same set of respondents during each of the different time periods. Obviously, they do not have 100% response rates at the later dates, but they determine statistically that the respondents at time 2 and time 3 are representative of the whole sample.
Now to the interesting part. In an earlier paper, Gibson, Caldeira, and Spence determined that the Supreme Court may have actually enhanced its institutional legitimacy after deciding Bush v. Gore. An interesting result, to be sure, but two of those authors now extend their research to examine the effects of confirmation hearings and primarily interest group advertisements on the the public’s views on the legitimacy of the Court. As I stated last week, the most interesting finding is that viewing advertisements during the Alito confirmation hearings negatively impacted the public’s views about the Supreme Court, and partisanship and/or support or opposition to Alito had no impact on public perception. In other words, support or opposition to Judge Alito did not impact people’s views of the Supreme Court. In addition, according to the authors, “[a]mong the best predictors of support for the Court are general political efficacy and lack of exposure to ads during the Alito dispute. Effects are also seen of democratic values (support for a multiparty system and political tolerance), and level of education.” While exposure to ads (both positive and negative) independently influenced public perception at time 3, paying attention to the confirmation hearings positively influenced public perception of the Court, though the latter variable had a marginal and insignificant effect according to the authors. Indeed, the ads had a corrosive effect on public opinion about the Court no matter how much an individual paid attention to the hearings.
The authors go even further to explain that their “findings suggest that perceptions of the ads may be endogenous in the sense that they are strongly influenced by expectations.” Put another way, people’s preconceived notions about whether the Court is a politically-oriented entity or whether it is “above politics” impact the responses that people have to the ads. Those who support the Court at time 1 are more likely to find that the ads are unfair, negative, and partisan at time 3. The typical political scientist who believes that the Court is highly political and that ideological and political considerations play a large role in the confirmation process are less likely to become disoriented by a “moderately politicized confirmation process in which the ideology of the nominee is widely discussed.” Another surprising, but somewhat unrelated finding, of the paper is that, though Americans believe it is important that Justices are impartial and fair, only 37.3% rate adherence and respect to existing Supreme Court decisions as “very important.” (Perhaps Justice Thomas is on to something.) After examining the data, the authors conclude that “politicized nomination processes do in fact detract from the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. . ., and that the corrosive effect seems not to be associated with the proceedings in the Senate.”
I believe this is a really important paper, and I complement the authors on their hard work in collecting the data. That said, I have some lingering questions for the authors. In my view, the timing of the authors’s time 1 interviews was unfortunate. The authors attempt to measure the influence of important events on the legitimacy of the Court, but the first wave of interviews occurred from “mid-May until mid-July, 2005.” Another important event occurred during that period: Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her intention to step down from the Court on July 1, 2005. As I recall, the media was raining accolades on Justice O’Connor as the first woman appointed to the Court, and reviewing her career with a great deal of reverence. I wonder whether her retirement and the accompanying media coverage around that event may have artificially boosted the public’s view of the Supreme Court? As other types of polling data suggest, the public’s views of government institutions and candidates can be fickle and can change from week-to-week. Although it may make no difference, I would humbly suggest to the authors that they test whether the pre-July 1 interviews are statistically different than the post-July 1 interviews in terms of support for the Court. Since the time 1 interviews are the benchmark with which to test the later time 3 interviews, an artificial boost of support from the retirement of Justice O’Connor would undermine the conclusions they reach after their time 3 interviews. A closely related query is whether the death of Chief Justice Rehnquist and the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts also could have had an impact on their interviews, though I would guess from the timing of the time 2 and time 3 interviews that any such influence would be marginal. Aside from these minor quibbles, I highly recommend this paper.
While the authors are certainly well respected in the discipline, survey research has not played the greatest role in the research of “judicial politics” (as the field is known in political science) – and with good reason. Americans usually know very little about the Court and even less about what it is doing. Thus, researchers have to be careful about fabricating opinion or making too much out of too little.
The notion that nominations have only recently become “politicized” is also problematic – if that is indeed the impression the paper leaves. Presidents have usually selected members of their own party for the Court and, as John R. Schmidhauser found, most have been friends or acquaintances of the presidents who have nomninated them. Opposite party control of the Senate has always been a problem for presidents and nominations made in the last year of the term have a very high failure rate. INdeed, the 19 percent failure rate for Supreme Court nominations is the highest for any national office. And the first failure appeared in the administration of George Washington.
In sum, these nominations have always been “political” and “politicized.”
Comment by P.S. Ruckman, Jr. — August 1, 2007 @ 12:51 pm
Whether survey research has “not played the greatest role” in scholarship on “judicial politics” (which, incidentally, I regard a very narrow definition of the important work on the Supreme Court) and, if so, whether it is for good reason–is not for me to judge. But, contrary to what the commenter says and what prior research indicates, a surprising percentage of the public knows and cares about the Supreme Court. See Gibson and Caldeira’s paper on knowledge of the Court on SSRN. We did not suggest that only recently have nominations become controversial, although of course our findings about advertisements obviously apply only to more recent nominations in which they figured.
–Greg Caldeira
Comment by caldeira — August 4, 2007 @ 10:53 pm
On the contrary, I would imagine that you would be among the most qualified persons in America to judge how much public opinion polling has been a part of the literature of judicial politics and what problems levels of knowledge present in that literature. In your 1986 APSR article, you noted most of the research linking public opinion and political institutions focued on the presidency and congress but, you observed, there were a “few hearty students” of courts that had “attempted” to discover the “levels, depth and bases of public support for judicial institutions.”
In that article, you also wrote, that empirical researchers, “for the most part,” had painted a “dreary and unencouraging portrait of public attitudes toward the Court. Citizens know surprisingly little about the Court and the workings of the judicial branch, manifest scant concern about its personnel and about most decisions.”
As I read this paper, even with millions of dollars spent on ads and hundreds of showings, 38 percent of the respondents would not even claim to have seen one – the mere claim being far from establishing that they (1) actually saw one (2) had high levels of knowledge about the Court and (3) care to any substantial degree. It thus seems reasonable to guess any “surprising numbers” in this piece specifically related to the Court (not the ads) would vanish into almost nothing in the months after the news cycles that focus on high profile or “controversial” nominations.
And, when Lexis goes out to do another poll, we can expect most Americans will not be able to name the Chief Justice, or most of the other Justices, and will not be able to comment on specific rulings, even those that are “recent” and “controversial.” One year they asked Americans to simply name the “highest court” in America. It was a train wreck.
So, the question on page 20 of this paper (note 30) takes the form that it does. It doesn’t ask “What stories have you been following?” or “What political stories have you been following?” It names Alito, points out that he is being nomninated to the Supreme Court and tells the respondent there is “debate” on the matter in the Senate. If, after all of that coaching, 38 percent still would not bite, how many would have named Alito and the hearings if the first two questions has been asked instead? It seems, to me, that is a very legitimate concern given everything we know about the literature of public opinion and courts – a literature which stretches back much further than the reference section of this papers suggests.
Comment by P.S. Ruckman, Jr. — August 10, 2007 @ 1:31 pm