Revisiting Senatorial Courtesy and the Selection of Judges to the U.S. Courts of Appeals

Abstract

We examine how elite attitudes and institutional rules and norms affect appointments to lower federal courts. Using voting data from 1,339 U.S. Courts of Appeals cases, we estimate new ideological measures for 475 individual circuit judges appointed between 1913 and 2008. We find that both presidential and home-state senators’ preferences strongly predict judicial ideology. While we find evidence that conditions of senatorial courtesy can constrain presidents from nominating like-minded individuals for lower court vacancies, this trend peaked during the 1960s and has been eroding ever since.