Comments on: Confirmation Hearings and the Influence on the Public (More on the Gibson and Caldeira Paper)

By: P.S. Ruckman, Jr.

P.S. Ruckman, Jr. — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 17:31:41 +0000

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.

By: caldeira

caldeira — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 02:53:55 +0000

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

By: P.S. Ruckman, Jr.

P.S. Ruckman, Jr. — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 16:51:45 +0000

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.”