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Someone like Me: Descriptive Representation and Support for Supreme Court Nominees
Abstract
Extant research on public support for judicial nominees finds that ideological congruence with the nominee is the most important factor in an individual’s decision to support a nominee. The research presented in this article develops the theory that for individuals from underrepresented groups, a shared descriptive identity with the nominee will moderate the negative effect of ideological distance. We test our theory using the nominations of Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. Furthermore, we conduct placebo tests to determine whether the effect of ideology is moderated for underrepresented groups when a shared descriptive identity is not present. We find that in the context of the Thomas nomination, a shared racial identity led to increased support for Thomas among liberal African Americans. We find similar effects in the case of Kagan and conservative women. In the case of Sotomayor, we find that a shared ethnic identity led to increased support among conservative Latinos, regardless of gender. We conclude by discussing the implications our findings have for descriptive representation and presidential selection of judicial nominees.
... While these findings may suggest our inquiry is redundant, the impact of ideology and partisanship on support for real nominees is not nearly so uniform as the results found in survey experiment literature. For example, research by Badas and Stauffer (2018) contains survey data from seven nominees (Alito, Breyer, Garland, Kagan, Roberts, Sotomayor, and Thomas), where respondent ideology is a significant predictor of support for all but two (Breyer and Alito), however partisanship is much less impactful. Specifically, Badas and Stauffer (2018) find respondent partisanship is a significant predictor of support for Kagan and Sotomayor, however insignificant for Thomas. ...
... For example, research by Badas and Stauffer (2018) contains survey data from seven nominees (Alito, Breyer, Garland, Kagan, Roberts, Sotomayor, and Thomas), where respondent ideology is a significant predictor of support for all but two (Breyer and Alito), however partisanship is much less impactful. Specifically, Badas and Stauffer (2018) find respondent partisanship is a significant predictor of support for Kagan and Sotomayor, however insignificant for Thomas. Their models for Breyer, Roberts, Alito, and Garland are reported using dummy variables for Republican and Democrat (rather than the party ID scale used for the others), and only three of eight of these dummy variables are significant predictors of support for the nominee: Republicans were more likely to support Roberts and Democrats more likely to support Breyer and Garland. ...
... Their models for Breyer, Roberts, Alito, and Garland are reported using dummy variables for Republican and Democrat (rather than the party ID scale used for the others), and only three of eight of these dummy variables are significant predictors of support for the nominee: Republicans were more likely to support Roberts and Democrats more likely to support Breyer and Garland. We note, however, that the most recent survey in Badas and Stauffer (2018)'s work -Garlandis often cited as an inflection point in politicization of nominations (Zilis and Blandau 2021;Truscott 2023). ...
We analyze a cache of tweets from partisan users concerning the confirmation hearings of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Using these original data, we investigate how Twitter users with partisan leanings interact with judicial nominations and confirmations. We find that these users tend to exhibit behavior consistent with offline partisan dynamics. Our analysis reveals that Democrats and Republicans express distinct emotional responses based on the alignment of nominees with their respective parties. Additionally, our study highlights the active participation of partisans in promoting politically charged topics throughout the confirmation process, starting from the vacancy stage.
... Research exploring the interaction between these characteristics and public perceptions is limited with extensive exploration of sexuality in relation to voter preferences and choices (Magni and Reynolds, 2021;Sanbonmatsu, 2002). Moreover, the research on public attitudes toward judicial nominees has indicated that Americans are more inclined to support nominees who share specific demographic attributes, highlighting the importance of these characteristics in shaping public opinions (Badas and Stauffer, 2018). ...
... This could be why marginalized groups may support or trust someone more if they descriptively represent them. Since the community is underrepresented, they are more willing to support someone from their community, even if they have different ideologies (Badas and Stauffer 2018). Social identity is defined as "that part of an individual's self-concept, which derives from that individual's knowledge of that individual's membership of a social group, together with the emotional value attached to that membership" (Fischer-Neumann, 2014). ...
... Since the public generally knows little about the judiciary and its judges, they focus more on the descriptive characteristic that matches them to gauge the amount of support they give them (Kaslovsky et al., 2019;McDermott, 1998). Scholars even state that when the judicial nominee shares a descriptive characteristic with someone, they are more likely to support them because of the shared characteristic, even when they disagree with them politically (Badas and Stauffer, 2018). ...
Recently, there has been an increase in political attention to the demographic characteristics of judicial nominees in the United States and how they can affect public opinion from judicial scholars. Particular emphasis has been placed on race and gender (i.e., male versus female), with comparatively less focus on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community. This paper uses a conjoint experiment to evaluate the relationship between public support and lesbian, gay, and bisexual Supreme Court nominees. The results show that the general public is less likely to support bisexual and gay nominees than straight ones. It also shows that when someone is gay (bisexual), they are more likely to support a nominee who is gay (bisexual) as well, along with a strong partisan divide in supporting gay (bisexual) nominees. These results have implications for shared descriptive representation, symbolic representation, and the support of judicial nominees.
... Existing research on the role that descriptive characteristics play in judicial evaluations falls into two broad camps. First, descriptive characteristics shape support for individual nominees (Badas & Stauffer, 2018;Sen, 2017). Second, the overall diversity of state (Overby et al., 2005), federal (Scherer & Curry, 2010), and international (Holst & Langvatn, 2021) courts shapes support for the respective institution. ...
... Most individuals evaluate judicial nominees similarly to other political actors (Sen, 2017), and perceived ideological or policy agreement influences perceptions of both the Court (Christenson & Glick, 2015) and nominees (Badas & Simas, 2022). In the same way that shared ideology can boost support for a nominee, so can shared identity, such as race; importantly, shared racial identity can increase support above and beyond, or even in spite of, perceived political similarity (Badas & Stauffer, 2018;Kaslovsky et al., 2021). Still, partisan attachments influence both Supreme Court evaluations (Armaly, 2018a;Clark & Kastellec, 2015) and nominee evaluations (Krewson & Schroedel, 2020;Krewson, 2023), and those who "lose" (on partisan grounds) when a new justice is confirmed confer less support on the institution (Armaly & Lane, 2022). ...
... This shared identity can, at times, help overcome ideological incompatibility due to its more symbolic benefits. For example, we see this in the relatively high levels of support for Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor among liberal Black Americans and conservative Latinos, respectively (Badas & Stauffer, 2018). Beyond the nomination context, identity also relates to evaluations of judges once they are on the bench in both positive and negative ways; Achury et al. (2023), Bracic et al. (2023), and Ono and Zilis (2022) find that ascriprive characteristics underscore perceptions of judicial fairness and (im) propriety. ...
We argue that characteristics of unelected officials directly influence individuals’ perceptions and evaluations of them. These evaluations then have indirect, downstream consequences on evaluations of the institution. To test this, we fielded a unique survey with an oversample of Black Americans after the nomination of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Using a conjoint experimental design to randomize nominee race, we find that increased racial descriptive representation elicits more favorable views of the nominee and Court among Black respondents. Causal mediation analysis confirms our theoretical expectation that descriptive representation indirectly influences views of the Court through its effects on views of nominees. The effects we uncover are not confined to co-partisan nominees, indicating that descriptive representation may matter for more than policy reasons alone. Finally, our external validity test suggests these effects generalize beyond our experimental setting, with Black (but not white) respondents equally as supportive of an anonymous profile matching Justice Jackson’s characteristics as they are of Jackson herself.
... Are men and women legislators scrutinized similarly for the votes they cast in Congress? Despite scholarship that compares the quality of issue representation provided to women and men constituents by their legislators (e.g., Griffin, Newman, and Wolbrecht 2012) and studies differences in how women and men constituents evaluate the same candidate or official (e.g., Badas and Stauffer 2018;Martin 2019), existing research provides relatively little insight about whether constituents apply ideological considerations similarly when evaluating women and men politicians. In the research most similar to our own, Jones (2014) finds that issue agreement is a stronger predictor of attitudes toward women Senators than men Senators. ...
... If descriptive representation increases perceptions of trust and provides women constituents with nonpolicy benefits (Mansbridge 1999), these factors may decrease the importance of policy congruence among women constituents when evaluating women representatives. Yet while Jones (2014) shows that women constituents apply issue positions more strongly than men in their evaluations of women senators, in the context of judicial nominees Badas and Stauffer (2018) show that shared descriptive identity reduces the importance of ideological considerations in constituent evaluations. More generally, other research documents the use of stereotypes among both men and women constituents when evaluating women officeholders (Bauer 2015;Cassese and Holman 2018). ...
... In general, however, these findings indicate that both men and women constituents are responsive to the degree of issue congruence with their legislators' voting records. Moreover, in contrast with both female empowerment theory (Jones 2014) and accounts that argue that members of underrepresented groups are more likely to support officials who share their descriptive identities (Badas and Stauffer 2018), we find evidence that women and men constituents are both more responsive to their legislator's voting record when they are represented by a woman rather than a man. ...
We study how officeholder gender affects issue accountability and examine whether constituents evaluate women and men legislators differently on the basis of their policy records. Data from 2008 through 2018 show that constituents’ approval ratings and vote choices in US House elections are more responsive to the policy records of women legislators than of men legislators. These patterns are concentrated among politically aware constituents, but we find no evidence that the results are driven disproportionately by either women or men constituents or by issues that are gendered in stereotypical ways. Additional analyses suggest that while constituents penalize women and men legislators at similar rates for policy incongruence, women legislators are rewarded more than men as they are increasingly aligned with their constituents. Our results show that accountability standards are applied differently across legislator gender and suggest a link between the quality of policy representation and the gender composition of American legislatures.
... Similarly, there exists a robust literature on attitudes about Supreme Court nominees themselves. Here scholars have emphasized factors such as: the link between diffuse support for the Supreme Court and support for particular nominees (Gibson and Caldeira 2009;Krewson and Schroedel 2020;Rogowski and Stone 2021); the importance of partisanship in conditioning support for nominees (Gimpel and Wolpert 1996;Kastellec et al. 2015;Sen 2017); and the relationship between demographic characteristics (particularly race and gender) and support for particular nominees (Badas and Stauffer 2018;Hansen and Dolan 2020;VanSickle-Ward et al. 2023). Our results speak most directly to partisanbased differences in views on the courts. ...
... Our paper also connects to a smaller literature that has focused on the relationship between opinion on appointments and the broader electoral environment. Badas and Stauffer (2018) and Bass, Cameron, and Kastellec (2022), for example, show that voters' approval or disapproval of how senators vote on Supreme Court nominees affects both voters' approval of their home state senators and their likelihood of voting to re-elect them. Relatedly, Hansen and Dolan (2020) show that attitudes toward Brett Kavanaugh predicted vote choice in the 2018 midterm elections, while VanSickle-Ward et al. (2023) find that in the wake of Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation in 2020, women who were concerned about the Court overturning Roe v. Wade were more likely to turn out in the 2020 elections. ...
While Supreme Court nominations have become increasingly high-salience political events, we know little about their prioritization relative to other issues by core constituency groups. We examine how individual donors and the mass public prioritize nominations, as well as factors they believe presidents should consider when selecting judges. To do so, we constructed original questions for a survey of over 7,000 validated donors and a comparison general population sample. We find donors are substantially more likely to prioritize nominations than their general public co-partisans, particularly Republican donors. Further analysis suggests the prioritization gap is consistent with theories that donors are motivated to move policy toward the ideological extremes. Analyzing policy positions, the largest donor-public difference occurs for diversity in appointments, but for all positions we find smaller differences than for prioritization. Overall, the findings highlight donors’ policy priorities may diverge from those of the public even more than policy positions do.
... This research focuses primarily on Supreme Court nominees. Badas and Stauffer (2018) find that sharing a gender identity with a Supreme Court nominee led to increased support for that nominee even among ideological opponents, as conservative women increased their support for Elena Kagan. However, Kaslovsky, Rogowski, and Stone (2021) find no evidence that respondents increase their support of judicial nominees that share their same gender identity. ...
... However, Kaslovsky, Rogowski, and Stone (2021) find no evidence that respondents increase their support of judicial nominees that share their same gender identity. Nevertheless, we expect that women with strong gender identities will be more likely to be persuaded by the copartisan female justices whom they are exposed to, as shared social identities tend to lead to increased levels of support and sense of legitimacy among the public (Mansbridge 1999;Sapiro 1981;Plutzer and Zipp 1996;Fox 1997;Sanbonmatsu 2002;Brians 2005;Scherer and Curry 2010;Badas and Stauffer 2018). ...
Possessing neither purse nor sword, the unelected US Supreme Court relies on sustained public confidence in its institutional credibility to give force to its decisions. Previous research shows that Supreme Court justices are increasingly making public appearances to engage in a course of institutional maintenance to preserve its legitimacy. Amid a potential legitimacy crisis, justices seek to shore up the Court’s public support in these public appearances by emphasizing the apolitical nature of the Court and its decision making. The question for a growing body of literature is whether these attempts at institutional maintenance do, in fact, lead to higher support for the Court. Using an original survey experiment where we manipulate the identity of the justice giving legitimizing rhetoric, we find that respondents’ ideological preferences and female respondents’ level of gender identity do impact the effectiveness of such rhetoric. These results build on previous work by demonstrating the importance of justice identity in conditioning how different ideologues respond to the Court’s elite signals.
... Although aggregate polling results are interesting and potentially influential, they obscure underlying trends in how Americans perceive, discuss, and evaluate the judiciary. Political scientists have taken the dynamics of public opinion about Supreme Court nominees more seriously (Badas & Stauffer, 2018;Gibson & Caldeira, 2011;Gimpel & Wolpert, 1995;Sen, 2017) but tend to focus on predictors of support or opposition per se rather than citizens' explanations for their stances. We argue that understanding how citizens evaluate Supreme Court nominees, including whether they emphasize political or apolitical factors, provides valuable insight regarding popular expectations and perceptions of the Supreme Court and federal judiciary. ...
... Several scholars have recently examined explanations for public support or opposition to federal judicial nominees (Badas & Stauffer, 2018;Hoekstra & LaRowe, 2013;Rogowski & Stone, 2021;Sen, 2017). These studies find that voters respond to the partisan or controversial natures of specific individuals chosen to serve on the Supreme Court. ...
In the 1980 and 1990s, supporters of Supreme Court nominees tended to characterize their views in non-ideological terms while opponents relied more on ideological justifications. Since then, the judicial appointment process has been increasingly entangled with partisan conflict. Given the heightened focus on nominees’ ideological preferences, we expect that citizens are now more likely to rely on political over non-political justifications, even if they support the nominee. We use data from a telephone survey in 2017 after the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to test this proposition. We find that contemporary citizens rely more frequently on political justifications for their support of nominees than then they did in the Reagan-Bush era. Opponents remain more likely to invoke political orientations, but the disparity has declined. The findings reveal both change and continuity in citizens’ evaluations of Supreme Court nominees.
... In presidential or other single-member district elections, gender affinity voting competes with ideological preferences and other candidates' attributes, as voters have limited choices. When elections are non-partisan (Badas & Stauffer, 2018) or when there are men and women candidates running under the same party label, voters can give more salience to gender affinity in their vote choice (Stauffer & Fisk, 2021). Open-list proportional representation systems (OLPR) are more appropriate for the manifestation of gender affinity voting. ...
... Previous studies report gender affinity voting under specific electoral rules, unique candidate match ups (Badas & Stauffer, 2018;Stauffer & Fisk, 2021), by looking at campaign donations (Thomsen & Swers, 2017) and by looking at whether an election has women candidates for the first time (Cargile & Pringle, 2020). In systems that discourage candidate-based voting, it is more difficult to express gender affinity (Goodyear-Grant & Croskill, 2011;Stauffer & Fisk, 2021). ...
In most democracies, women are a majority in the electorate, but men are the majority of those elected. Previous studies on gender affinity voting that point to substantive, descriptive and symbolic representation are often based on polling date and focus on whether women issues were central in the election. Since electoral rules—including candidate gender quotas—impact the choices voters have, we use a novel database with precinct-level voting data for 960 candidates (397 women) in the 28 open-list proportional representation districts for the 2017 Chamber of Deputies election in Chile to identify the determinants of gender affinity voting for candidates in same party matchups and whether gender affinity voting differently impacted left and rightwing parties. Using 35,120 precincts, we analyze 1,344,098 data points for individual candidates’ vote shares. We find statistically significant, but not substantive, gender affinity voting, especially favorable to women candidates in leftwing parties.
... Consider, for example, the vicarious trauma experienced by Black people in 2020 as they witnessed the police brutality that resulted in the deaths of Breonna Taylor (Kentucky) and George Floyd (Minnesota). These experiences, racial socialization, and Black political history often lead to the development of a racial group identity and consciousness that drives Black Americans' support for public policies, positive perceptions of Black political leaders, and voting behavior (Dawson 1994;Tate 1994;McClain et al. 2009;Badas and Stauffer 2018). ...
Black legal theorists often believe White Americans see Black judges as incapable of deciding racial issues fairly. Using a survey experiment, we examine this by studying perceptions of Black and White judges’ fairness through racial threat and group consciousness. Results show race consistently influences Black Americans’ evaluations of judges, with Black respondents viewing Black judges as fairer on racial issues. For White respondents, race only affects their views of judges in the context of racial resentment, otherwise playing no significant role. These results highlight the complex interplay of race in judicial evaluations.
... Scholarship that studies evaluations of judges in judicial elections tends to focus on aggregate outcomes rather than individual survey respondent attitudesinvestigating how candidate (e.g., quality or campaign resources) or district (e.g., crime rates) characteristics shape district or state-level voting behavior. This contrasts with the emphasis studies of the federal judiciary place on measuring support for individual judges (Sen 2017;Badas and Stauffer 2018;Kaslovsky, Rogowski, and Stone 2021) and on the link between individual judges and the judiciary's broader institutional standing (Krewson and Schroedel 2020;Carrington and French 2021;Glick 2023). Similarly, studies of legislators or executives emphasize the importance of measuring support for or approval of these actors (e.g., Canes-Wrone and De Marchi 2002;Ansolabehere and Kuriwaki 2022). ...
Do constituents care how judges are chosen? We conduct two nationally representative survey experiments focusing on state trial courts. Our first study indicates that respondents prefer judges who are elected to those who are appointed, though this does not affect their perceptions of the judiciary’s legitimacy. Our second study explores three potential mechanisms: efficacy, experience with democracy, and perceived ideological proximity. We find evidence that real-world experience with judicial elections is associated with a preference for such elections, but we do not find evidence for other mechanisms. Our study offers important new evidence for assessing proposed reforms to judicial selection.
... Given their success and possible obstacles faced along the way, women judges might be particularly attuned to the challenges women face when aspiring to professional careers, and this awareness may filter into their hiring decisions. 15 Moreover, at the mass level, scholars have identified a "base-line gender preference" such that voters prefer to be represented by candidates who share their gender, and this preference is stronger among women (Sanbonmatsu (2003); see also Badas and Stauffer (2018), Badas and Stauffer (2019), Stauffer and Fisk (2022)). While there are of course differences between voters selecting candidates and judges hiring clerks, if women have an underlying preference for women's descriptive representation, all else equal, this may manifest in the hiring process. ...
Federal law clerks play a vital role in the development and implementation of the law. Yet, women remain underrepresented in these positions. We suggest that one reason for this underrepresentation may be differences in hiring practices among judges in the federal judiciary. Specifically, we hypothesize that male judges and conservative judges may be less likely to hire female law clerks than female judges and liberal judges for two reasons. First, gendered attitudes held by judges may make some judges prone to hire women and/or others more resistant to these hires. Second, due to ideological asymmetries between the law clerk pool and judges in the federal judiciary, conservative judges and male judges may be less likely to hire women law clerks. Using data on clerks hired in the federal judiciary between 1995 and 2005, we find support for both mechanisms.
... Cormack and Karl (2022) extend this research by showing that among partisan groupings, women receive more favourable evaluations from women respondents. A preference for and higher evaluation of same-gender officials extends to other prominent governmental positions and can moderate the impact of ideological differences, such as conservative women's support for a same-gender, liberal Supreme Court nominee (Badas and Stauffer, 2018). Additional studies on substantive representation confirm that politicians are sometimes given the benefit of the doubt by members of a descriptive group. ...
Several studies have examined whether attitudinal factors make people more willing to accept political elites violating basic democratic norms. However, the role of more basic socio-demographic characteristics, such as gender, remains underexplored. This may be a mistake, as studies suggest that these influence the evaluation of democratic transgressions. We focus on the role of gender in evaluations of democratic transgressions and reexamine data from two conjoint experiments conducted in Finland. We examine whether the gender of the politician violating democratic norms matters, whether the gender of the person judging the democratic violations matters, and whether it matters for the evaluation of the democratic violation when both the candidate and the respondent are of the same gender. Our results indicate that gender plays at best a limited role, as we find no evidence that candidate gender or the gender of the respondent matters for the evaluations.
... 6 A lengthy literature argues that the public gives wide latitude to the Supreme Court (Gibson and Nelson 2014). Even when it acts in ways 4 That logic only holds, however, if elected officials are responsive to public preferences regarding nominations (Badas and Stauffer 2018;Kastellec et al. 2015). 5 Pew Research Center, 2016 "Top Voting Issues in the 2016 Election." ...
Despite the Supreme Court’s lack of direct electoral accountability, voters may factor its outputs into their voting decisions because elected representatives can affect the Court’s powers and composition. In this paper, we uncover an ironic predicament that faces candidates running on reforming this institution. Citizens who possess higher levels of diffuse support for the Court are more likely to rank it as an important factor in their voting logic. But because this diffuse support has sorted along partisan lines, candidate messaging about reform may not motivate partisans who have lost support for the Court because they view it as less important than other pressing issues. Thus, although Democrats are sympathetic to reform, Democratic candidates may have weak incentives to promote reform given low levels of diffuse support among their constituents. This dynamic mitigates against the possibility of a public or congressional backlash against the Court, preserving the status quo.
... For the nominees, being interrupted may stall their efforts to overcome the competence bias women and people of color face in interviews across professions (Boyd, Collins, and Ringhand 2018;Christensen, Szmer, and Stritch 2012;Haynie 2002;Lawless 2004;Nelson 2015). More broadly, since legitimacy and public support rest on representative inclusion in governing institutions (Badas and Stauffer 2018;Barnes 2016;Clayton, O'Brien, and Piscopo 2018;Harris and Sen 2019;Means, Eslich, and Prado 2019;Scherer 2023;Stauffer 2021;Widner 2023), public displays of bias against women and people of color can result in lower rates of ambition for members of those groups (Fox and Lawless 2014;Williams 2008) and aggravate a sense that our government does not represent them (Campbell and Wolbrecht 2006). ...
In this research letter, we examine whether gender and racial bias affect interruption rates at one of the most visible events in American politics: US Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Using original data from 1939 to 2022, we find that male and white participants are more likely to interrupt women and person of color speakers, respectively, relative to male and white speakers. This finding holds for both senators and nominees as interrupters. Our results provide evidence that biased interruptive behavior occurs in even the most public and salient of political settings and that it can be mitigated (or intensified) by shared (or opposite) partisanship among speaking pairs. We also find interruption inequalities are not isolated to women as the interrupted, revealing that people of color in political and legal settings are subject to heightened rates of interruptions as well.
... Not only do presidents consider it, but they appear to go out of their way to advertise their diverse nominees (Holmes, 2008). There is good reason for this, as research has shown diverse nominees can gain more support and even positively influence presidential approval (Badas & Stauffer, 2018, 2022. If presidents were more willing to consider and advertise nominees with modest financial situations, they may see similar increases in support for their nominee and potentially for themselves. ...
Relying on theories positing general resentment of the rich, we argue that people who believe there are a greater number of Justices who are millionaires will have more negative attitudes towards the Court than those who believe there are fewer millionaires on the Court. Analyzing the results of a nationally representative survey, we find that individuals who believe a larger number of the Justices are millionaires are more likely to believe the Court gives special rights to the wealthy and are overall less likely to view the Court as legitimate. We supplement these results with a survey experiment, demonstrating that individuals believe the Court will become less fair if a millionaire nominee is confirmed to be a Justice and that individuals are less likely to support a millionaire nominee compared to nominees with a lower net worth. Our results have implications for perceptions of bias within the judiciary, the selection of judicial nominees, and how attitudes about the wealthy can influence attitudes towards institutions.
... constituent communication to mitigate the potential for gender bias. We argue and show that female lawmakers develop relationships with constituents based on empathy and community building, and these relationships can lead to increased political efficacy and engagement among citizens and a greater sense of democratic legitimacy (Badas and Stauffer 2018;Clayton, O'Brien, and Piscopo 2019;Hayes and Hibbing 2017;Lawless 2004;Michelson 2000;Pantoja and Segura 2003;Stauffer 2019;Wolak 2020). Theories of democratic representation argue that heightened descriptive representation leads to improved substantive and symbolic representation of marginalized communities (Mansbridge 1999;Pitkin 1967;Schwindt-Bayer 2010;Schwindt-Bayer and Mishler 2005;Tate 2018). ...
This article advances and tests an original theory of a “feminine homestyle” to explain how female legislators develop relationships with constituents that both mitigate the potential for gendered biases and fulfill the communal goals that motivate women to run for political office. We use an original audit study that tests legislator responsiveness to direct email communication. We show that female lawmakers are more responsive to constituent communication and more likely to display compassion and empathy in responses compared with male legislators; but we also find important differences in women’s responsiveness across the race and ethnicity. Further, we find that responsive female lawmakers can change the behaviors of their male counterparts by creating stronger norms of responsiveness within legislative institutions. Our findings have important downstream implications for democratic accountability among voters and illustrate how female lawmakers substantively represent through direct communication with constituents.
... Various studies revealed that perceived congruence might influence individuals' political behaviors such as voting turnout (Reher, 2014), support of political campaigns (Ensley, 2009), improved democracy satisfaction (Reher, 2015), political candidates support (Badas et al., 2018), and political crowd funding (Aaker et al., 2009). Kusumurani et al. (2019) indicated that people with stronger congruence with political candidates are more inclined to vote. ...
... For example, scholars have explored whether racial representation would enhance people's perceived legitimacy of domestic courts in the U.S. and found that greater representation of Black judges leads to a higher perception of legitimacy among African Americans, but has the opposite effect among White Americans (Scherer and Curry 2010). Support for co-racial candidates has also been found to be consistent among White Republicans and Black Democrats for nominees to the Supreme Court (Kaslovsky, Rogowski, and Stone 2019), or have varying implications for different racial and ideological groups (Badas and Stauffer 2018). Where gender is concerned, studies have demonstrated that greater representation of women in the government improve female citizens' attitudes toward government responsiveness (Atkeson and Carrillo 2007), but surprisingly, women's equal representation may also legitimize decisions that go against women's interests by conferring institutional trust (Clayton, O'Brien, and Piscopo 2019). ...
... In some cases, the mere belief that minoritized people are included can be enough to evoke these feelings Tate, 2003). While this research has most frequently focused on descriptive representation among elected officials, increasingly scholars are examining these relationships in the context of non-elected political actors as well (Badas & Stauffer, 2018Barnes & Taylor-Robinson, 2018;Liu & Banaszak, 2017). ...
While widespread agreement that policing in the United States needs to be reformed arose in the summer of 2020, little consensus about specific reforms was reached. A common theme that arose, however, is a general lack of trust in the police. One response has been to increase agency diversity in terms of both officer race and officer gender. However, important questions exist about when – and what type(s) of – diversity shape citizen trust in and willingness to cooperate with the police – especially when considered in conjunction with agency performance and policies. To answer these questions, we use two conjoint experiments to evaluate whether citizens consider diversity when evaluating police agencies. We find that while both racial and gender diversity can influence public evaluations sometimes, these effects tend to emerge in the context of only the most (least) diverse institutions and are muted compared to the effects of agency policies and performance.
... Research continues to illustrate racialized decisionmaking in cases based on a shared identity with a jurist or racialized case issues (Boldt et al., 2021;Mak et al., 2021;Boyd, 2016;Fix & Johnson, 2017;Chew & Kelley, 2012;Goelzhauser, 2011;Hofer & Casellas, 2020). 1 However, racial diversity on the bench is more than mere descriptive representation. Being represented by those who "look" like you positively impacts the perception of judicial procedures as fair for minority observers (Badas & Stauffer, 2018;Hayes & Hibbing, 2017). While respondents indicate they care more about the outcome of cases, there are still some differences in how men respond to outcomes by female judges; moreover, there are even differences in how women and people of color write decisions (Fix & Johnson 2017;Stauffer 2021;Moyer et al. 2021). ...
Despite evidence that racial diversification has increased support for the judiciary, political scientists know little about the heterogeneous effects of diversification across different population segments. Previous research illustrates that including Black judges increases judicial legitimacy among the Black population, but it decreases the legitimacy of the courts among the White population. We expand on this knowledge by examining the impact of adding Latinos to the bench. Our survey experiment compares White respondents’ perception of the courts based on differing levels of Latino representation in the ruling panel. Does descriptive representation in the racialized issue area of immigration signal fairness and legitimacy to White respondents? Or does the inclusion of Latino jurists in immigration cases trigger racial animosity and decreasing support for the courts? We find that when the court rules against the White respondent’s preference, they tend to penalize all-White judicial panels that rule against the perceived interest of Latinos. Additionally, we find that when presented with a Latino majority panel, White respondents who disagree with the ruling are more likely to punish the anti-Latino decisions as their levels of group consciousness increase. Ultimately, our findings illustrate how judicial diversity may affect the countermajoritarian capacity of the judiciary.
... Research continues to illustrate racialized decisionmaking in cases based on a shared identity with a jurist or racialized case issues (Boldt et al., 2021;Mak et al., 2021;Boyd, 2016;Fix & Johnson, 2017;Chew & Kelley, 2012;Goelzhauser, 2011;Hofer & Casellas, 2020). 1 However, racial diversity on the bench is more than mere descriptive representation. Being represented by those who "look" like you positively impacts the perception of judicial procedures as fair for minority observers (Badas & Stauffer, 2018;Hayes & Hibbing, 2017). While respondents indicate they care more about the outcome of cases, there are still some differences in how men respond to outcomes by female judges; moreover, there are even differences in how women and people of color write decisions (Fix & Johnson 2017;Stauffer 2021;Moyer et al. 2021). ...
The American judiciary has seen a significant rise in diversity with active efforts by presidents to confirm women and racial minorities to the bench, yet a lack of representation remains an issue. While most of the scholarship on the influx of jurists from diverse backgrounds is centered on identifying differences in judicial decision making, we empirically test the impact of racial and gender diversification on the ability of selectors to influence case outcomes by nominating ideologically-aligned judges. Does the selection of judges from underrepresented backgrounds affect the ability of the elected branches to align their ideological preferences on the federal bench? We argue that differences in uncertainty, network integration, and ideological availability within the candidate pool can make it more difficult for selectors to predict the ideological preferences of racial minorities; therefore, their decisions on the bench are less aligned with their selectors’ preferences. Using case outcomes on the federal district courts (1985–2012), we find that decisions adopted by White judges tend to closely align with the ideological preferences of their selectors regardless of their gender; however, the ideology of selectors has no relationship with decisions adopted by most jurists of color, with the exception of Latinas and Asian-Americans. Our results show that diversifying the bench has an ideological cost for the political actors involved in the appointment of district court judges. Weak links between the ideology of the selectors and the behavior of the judges mean lower judicial deference to political actors, and to that extent, the judiciary may become more independent of ongoing ideological battles in American politics.
What determines public support for judicial nominees? We argue that support for nominees is based on policy congruence, and a nominee’s candor at her confirmation hearing can assist citizens as they try to align their support for a nominee with their own policy preferences. When nominees are evasive, other cues, such as past practice experience and interest group statements, can help citizens align their policy preferences with their support for a nominee. Drawing on two nationally representative survey experiments, we demonstrate that, when nominees demur in their answers to abortion questioning, citizens’ policy preferences play only a small role in shaping support for a nominee. But, when a nominee is forthcoming about their views on abortion, citizens’ policy views are a strong predictor of their desire to have the nominee confirmed. In a conjoint experiment, we demonstrate that—particularly in the absence of forthcoming statements from nominees—interest group support can help citizens to calibrate their policy views with their support for a nominee. The results emphasize the importance of confirmation hearings, even when nominees are evasive, for shaping public support.
Is there a gender affinity effect present in the amount of contributions individuals donate to candidates for state supreme courts, and if so, is it moderated by ideology? Using data from FollowTheMoney.org and the Bonica and Woodruff common space measures of state judicial ideology, we find both a “gender affinity” effect and an effect of ideology. More specifically, we find that women donors provide greater support to women candidates, whereas women candidates are disadvantaged among male donors. Moreover, the financial support for women candidates is moderated by the candidate’s ideology, with more liberal women candidates enjoying greater levels of financial support from women contributors and less support from male donors. We suggest this pattern of contribution decisions can affect the pool of viable women candidates for state supreme courts.
Public opinion about the U.S. Supreme Court is heavily influenced by whether people perceive that the Court aligns with them ideologically. However, most Americans do not follow the Court closely enough to make informed inferences about their proximity to the Court. To explain this paradox, we theorize that when Americans perceive that they share a salient identity with the Supreme Court Justices, they attribute their own ideological orientation to the Court. Focusing on evangelical Christians, we find strong evidence for this theory. Survey analysis reveals that when evangelicals perceive that a majority of the Justices are evangelical Christians, they report less ideological distance from the Court, even though this does not affect their objective distance from the Court. To clarify the causal direction of this relationship, we conduct a conjoint experiment—showing that when evangelicals evaluate hypothetical nominees to the Court, they report that evangelical nominees are closer to them ideologically. By showing that the Court’s social imagery influences subjective ideological distance judgments, we help explain both the disconnect between subjective and objective proximity and the continued significance of subjective proximity judgments.
The number of women on high courts across the globe has been steadily increasing. Recent estimates found that women now make up 61% of the judiciary in European countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2019). The large number of women now serving in judicial positions has resulted in a changing demographic makeup of courts. While the majority might think this is a step forward for diverse representation, there is ultimately a dichotomy between judicial accountability that comes as a result of increased diversity in descriptive representation and judicial independence. Given this dichotomy, along with the increase in women on courts, it follows that the public’s perceptions of courts’ independence has the potential to change. We explore this phenomenon by asking the following question: How does the presence of women on high courts impact perceptions of judicial independence among the public? Using survey data gathered from respondents in twenty-seven European countries from 2016 to 2022, we examine how the dynamics of an increasing number of women on high courts alters the public’s perceptions on the level of independence of the court in their country. We draw from literature on judicial independence as well as women political elites and corruption. Importantly, we document that increasing the percentage of women on courts results in higher perceptions of judicial independence for women. Overall, our findings highlight important trends regarding gender diversity in political institutions and how changes in descriptive characteristics shape perceptions of judicial independence.
Courts are often thought of as protectors of minority rights. What happens when the composition of courts changes such that politically disadvantaged groups expect a less favorable reception? This Element examines whether the increasing conservatism of the US Supreme Court during Donald Trump's presidency changed the behavior of litigants and amicus curiae. The authors test whether membership changes led to reduced filings by individuals and organizations representing marginalized groups and increased filings by businesses and conservative states and interest groups. The authors find substantial reductions in participation by the most politically disadvantaged and substantial increases in participation by the most conservative groups.
The American mass public abstractly supports the federal judiciary, but supports concrete alterations to the institution (e.g., term limits). We argue that some efforts to alter the institution are not exclusively punitive, but relate to broader, non-judicial orientations toward government. Using nationally representative data from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES), we find that attitudes toward representation and which types of people ought to hold power underlie support for judicial elections. Specifically, perceived representation, believing men to be better suited to politics than women, and holding racist attitudes are related to support for appointments over elections, even when controlling for diffuse support, perceived judicial politicization, and other relevant measures regarding the judiciary. We argue such individuals wish to maintain the appointment system which has yielded perceived benefits. Additionally, political sophistication exacerbates these effects. Rather than just a way to alter courts for delivering displeasing policy, support for some judicial changes may relate to efforts to democratize, and thereby diversify, courts.
Public trust and perceptions of institutional legitimacy are vital to the functioning of the federal court system, and recent work challenges the long-standing belief that these attitudes are relatively stable in the populace. We posit that one threat to perceptions of trust and legitimacy is the lack of representation for women in the federal judiciary. Using a series of experiments, we show that, while women desire descriptive representation, this is an insufficient condition for preserving support for the institution. Substantive representation on issues critical to women leads to significantly increased trust and legitimacy and lowered perceptions of institutional bias among women. While female judges may bring their own social identities to bear in their decision-making, our work suggests that efforts to diversify the federal judiciary, while important, are unlikely to bolster public support for the courts if the new judges and justices fail to substantively represent the communities of interest.
Historical markers offer important insights into the portrayal of place, social dynamics, and untold narratives within various landscapes (Alderman 2012; Bardet 2012; Otterstrom and Davis 2020). The vast collection of over 195,000 historical markers scattered throughout the United States (The Historical Marker Database n.d.) provide a wealth of data that can shed light on distinctive representation patterns and narratives associated with different individuals and events. Yet, only a few studies examined historical markers as a valuable data source (e.g. Alderman 2012; Hanna and Hodder 2015). The goal of this study is to investigate how Texas women are commemorated through historical markers and to uncover the spatial and temporal patterns and contexts associated with these commemorations. We utilize Qualitative GIS method and a suite of corpus linguistics techniques to analyze the spatial, temporal, and thematic patterns of the historical markers in Texas that are dedicated to women. Our findings address the existing gender imbalance and shed light on the underrepresentation of women in Texas' historical narratives.
Racial and gender bias pervade American political institutions, and the Supreme Court is no exception. Women lawyers are interrupted more and allowed to speak for less time than their male colleagues. We expect that stereotypes will also lead to biased treatment of attorneys of color, and will have the greatest impact on women attorneys of color due to their intersectional identity. In doing so, we introduce a refined measure of interruptions that more precisely captures oral argument dynamics. Using a database of the race of members of the Supreme Court bar and transcripts of all oral arguments held from October Terms 2009 – 2018, we find that women attorneys of color receive harsher treatment by the justices during oral arguments than their peers. We also find that when the case involves racial issues, attorneys of color are interrupted less than their white counterparts.
Extant research reveals that Americans hold politically consequential beliefs about the demographic composition of political groups and organizations—even when these beliefs are at odds with objective reality. In this article, we investigate the social imagery of the U.S. Supreme Court, with particular attention to beliefs about the Supreme Court Justices’ religious identities. In survey analysis, we find that evangelicals who believe there are more evangelical Christians on the Court grant the Court more legitimacy compared to non-evangelicals. Further, when evangelical Christians believe there are more atheists on the Court, they view the Court less legitimately than non-evangelicals. To rule out the potential of endogeneity, we conduct a conjoint experiment which demonstrates that evangelicals believe evangelical judges will increase the fairness of the Court and are more likely to support evangelical nominees compared to the average nominee. Likewise, they tend to believe out-group judges will harm the fairness of the Court and are less likely to support out-group judges. Our results have implications for diversity on the Court and how non-ideological factors can affect the Court’s legitimacy.
Over the course of the last several years, the power structure of authority has migrated from a limited number of authoritative persons or organizations to the broader population. This movement in power has occurred as a result of a shift in the power structure of authority. The image of the country lays a greater focus on respect for human rights, and the freedom of people to elect their own representatives has become a primary priority. The nation's image also places a larger emphasis on the respect for human rights. In particular, the new international system requires political authorities all over the globe to preserve the right of citizens to voice their thoughts and to implement democratic ideals. This is an obligation that was not previously present. According to Shapland (2015), the presence of political engagement on the part of citizens inside their own cultures is an essential component that is essential to the continued existence of democracies in all nations. Researchers and practitioners in marketing are being urged to investigate the aspects that give insight on why individuals are anticipated to join in political activities. These dynamics include things like individual sources of information (Opdycke et al.
Men and women diverge in their political behavior and attitudes. We test whether gender-based variation in political attitudes extends to perceptions of US Supreme Court legitimacy. Using a dataset covering the years 2012–2017, we show that one’s identification as a man or a woman predicts their diffuse support for the Court. In particular, women almost always extend less legitimacy to the Court than men do. This is true within both Republican and Democratic identifiers, and regression analysis shows the gender gap holds when controlling for partisanship, ideology, race, age, education, income, and Supreme Court approval. Additionally, we included a series of questions in a 2021 Cooperative Election Study (CES) module to explore why the gender gap in perceived legitimacy exists. We find that differences in perceptions of the Court’s representation of women and its fairness drive the gender gap in legitimacy.
Does race/ethnicity effect how voters assess political candidates? To address this question, we pooled data from 43 published candidate experiments from the last 10 years with a combined N of 305,632. We distinguish three different schools of thought that authors apply: unjust stereotypes, useful stereotypes and shared identification. Voters use “unjust stereotypes” and discriminate against candidates of color or use “useful stereotypes” that inform them of the policy positions they expect candidates to defend. Scholars increasingly apply a “shared identification” perspective and study the effect of congruence between voter and candidate characteristics on assessments. The results show that voters do not assess racial/ethnic minority candidates differently than their majority (white) counterparts. This does not hold for Asian candidates in the US: voters assess them slightly more positively than majority candidates, although this effect is small (0.76 percentage points). Shared identification matters enormously: when voters share the same race/ethnicity as a candidate they assess them 7.9 percentage points higher than that they assess majority candidates. This effect is substantively meaningful and significant for all most researched (US-based) races/ethnicities. This indicates that the underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minority citizens cannot be explained by voting behavior, but possibly by supply side effects.
This article explores the causes and consequences of public attitudes toward the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court. Drawing on survey data from the Public Policy Institute of California, we pose two central questions. First, what were the key factors shaping support or opposition to Barrett’s confirmation? Second, how did the nomination affect voter engagement in the 2020 Election? In addition to the expected factor of partisanship, we uncover two striking elements that shape attitudes toward Barrett’s confirmation – gender and attitude toward overturning Roe v. Wade. We further find that among women, concerns over the demise of Roe v. Wade spurred voter turnout in 2020. Our findings shed light on the political psychology of attitudes toward the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, the ramifications of these attitudes for voter engagement, and broader implications for the Supreme Court’s legitimacy in light of this politicized nomination.
Law clerks hold immense responsibilities and exert influence over the judges they work with. However, women remain underrepresented in these positions. We argue that one reason for this underrepresentation is that – like potential political candidates – female law students may have lower levels of ambition compared to men. Using a survey of student editors at thirty-three top law reviews, we find that there is a gender gap in ambition for clerkships with the Supreme Court and Federal Courts of Appeal. Examining potential sources of this difference, we find that while women view themselves to be just as qualified for these positions as men, men are more willing to apply with lower feelings of qualification. Likewise, while women and men report similar levels of encouragement, more encouragement is required before women express ambition to hold these posts. The findings presented here have implications for research on judicial politics, political ambition, and women’s representation.
How do Americans’ preferences over judicial philosophy influence their support for judges and judicial decisions? Using an experiment attached to an adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis, we find that people hold preferences over judicial philosophies, that they rely on those preferences to evaluate judges and decisions, and that those preferences are not simply stand-ins for ideology and partisanship. These findings suggest that to understand people’s support for judges and judicial decisions one must pay attention to judicial philosophy.
Relying on theories of motivated reasoning, I hypothesize that individuals who favor a nominee will prefer a legalistic confirmation hearing, while those who oppose a nominee will prefer a politicized confirmation hearing. Analyzing survey data from five recent nominees and a survey experiment, I find support for this hypothesis. The results have implications for how the public interacts with the nature of the Court’s hybrid institutional structure. Specifically, I argue the results support the notion that the public engages in a political calculation when making judgements about the Court. When it serves their preferences, people will view the Court as a legalistic institution; however, when individuals believe there is an advantage in viewing the Court as a political institution, they are more likely to desire the Court to be evaluated in political ways.
Some narratives claim that American presidents can increase their approval ratings by nominating members of underrepresented groups to positions within the judiciary. Indeed, public opinion polls frequently show that members of the public think presidents should consider individuals from underrepresented groups when making judicial appointments. Despite the prevalence of these narratives, little research investigates how the descriptive characteristics of judicial appointments influence public evaluations of the president. We find that the public views presidents more favourably when they are more inclusive of women and minorities in their judicial appointments, and this effect is particularly strong for Democrats. The results demonstrate that presidents can increase public support by appointing individuals from underrepresented groups. This research has implications for representation and judicial selection in the United States.
This chapter makes a case for applying a masculinities lens to understand multiple forms of violence in conflict and nonconflict settings. It discusses how violence is tied to inequalities, marginalization, patriarchal and other power structures, masculinities, and young men’s identities. It further examines how those dynamics shape the differential impact of conflict on females versus males and individuals of other gender identities. Further, it brings an intersectional understanding of how ethnicity, social class, and masculinities interact in conflict and high-violence settings, addressing the cases of Brazil and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
In the last several decades a wide literature has developed around gendered perceptions of political leaders. However, to date, the lion’s share of this literature has examined elected officials. Here we argue that a similar effect can be found in perceptions of judges and judging. Using two survey experiments, we argue that the core quality by which judges are evaluated, “judiciousness,” is gendered masculine. In essence, when individuals are asked to evaluate nominees, personality and character information is used differently depending on the gender of the nominee. In particular, female nominees face a double standard, failing to benefit equally from positive personality information while male nominees enjoy greater support. Thus, even if female nominees are successful in obtaining Senate confirmation, they face a steeper hill to climb with how people perceive their judiciousness than a similarly qualified male nominee would.
Supreme Court job approval is sensibly connected to its decisions, particularly salient ones. We fill a gap in the literature by theorizing—via a presidential appointment mechanism—how partisan alignment with the incumbent president (presidential copartisanship) influences Supreme Court job approval. Analysis of data from 1986 to 2019 (supplemented by longer‐term confidence data) shows that a president's copartisans are significantly more approving of the Court than outpartisans. Analysis of the American Panel Survey surrounding high‐salience events during the transition from Obama to Trump shows that Republicans, who significantly increase in Court approval following Trump's election victory, are anticipatory of Trump's prospects of changing the Court. Democrats, whose approval significantly declines only after Justice Gorsuch's confirmation, are not anticipatory but reactive to the president's confirmed appointee. Our findings generate new evidence of how the president structures public opinion toward the Court, which has important implications for judicial independence and legitimacy.
Political psychology applies what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. It examines citizens’ vote choices and public opinion as well as how political leaders deal with threat, mediate political conflicts, and make foreign policy decisions. The second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology gathers together a distinguished group of international scholars to shed light on such questions as: To what extent are people’s political choices influenced by information outside of conscious awareness? Does personality affect leadership style? Do strong emotions distort the political process and worsen or enhance political decisions? Focusing on political psychology at the individual level (genes, early childhood, personality, decision-making, emotions, values, ideology) and the collective (group identity, social justice, mass mobilization, political violence, prejudice reduction), this interdisciplinary volume covers models of the mass public and political elites and addresses both domestic issues and foreign policy. The volume provides an up-to-date, comprehensive, and expertly distilled account of cutting-edge research within both psychology and political science.
Presidents often see a Supreme Court nomination as an opportunity to leave a lasting mark on policy. Recent studies speculate that focusing on Supreme Court nominees affects presidential success beyond the confirmation process, but this has not been established systematically. We develop and test a hypothesis stating that presidents who get into a battle to promote a controversial Supreme Court nominee will see delays and failures in their efforts to promote their legislative agenda in the Senate and fill lower level judicial vacancies. We test our theory using data on presidential policy agenda items from 1967 to 2010 and lower level judicial nominations from 1977 to 2010. We find that increased efforts in promoting confirmation reduce the likelihood of timely Senate approval of important policy proposals and nominees to federal district courts.
This article examines the effect of Hispanic constituents on senators' votes to confirm or reject the nomination of Sonia M. Sotomayor to join the U.S. Supreme Court. We study the impact of Hispanics in senators' reelection and geographical constituencies. Using logistic regression and advanced postestimation techniques we find that, contrary to popular expectations and hypotheses derived from previous research, Hispanics had little or no impact on the outcome. We then suggest potential explanations and implications of this finding.
Theories of low-information voting are used to examine the effect of candidate demographic characteristics on voting behavior, specifically candidate gender. For voters in low-information elections, candidate gender operates as a social information cue signaling that women candidates are more liberal than men candidates of the same party. As a result, the gender of a candidate affects ideological voting. Logistic regression analysis is performed on data from the 1986 through 1994 American National Election Studies. Women Democratic candidates fare better than men Democratic candidates among more liberal voters and worse among conservative voters, especially those with minimal knowledge of the candidates. The effect is less clear with Republican women candidates who provide conflicting informational cues (woman and Republican).
Recent years have witnessed an increasing demand by women for political representation of women. This demand points the way toward a number of important problems for political research, many of which remain unsolved primarily because of the segregation of women's studies from the dominant concerns of political science. This discussion focuses on the problem of group interests and representation, drawing on and suggesting further research on public opinion, interest groups, social movements, international politics, political elites, and public policy.
Political scientists have largely explored beliefs about racial and gender inequality independently of one another; and, as a result, it remains unclear how attitudes about these two groups might work together to jointly shape policy support. To evaluate this relationship, we conducted an experiment in the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) in which we manipulated racial cues in a survey question about a gender-based pay equity policy. We found that support for the policy is determined by beliefs about women’s experiences of discrimination. However, beliefs about systematic racial discrimination also shaped policy attitudes. Among white liberals, both Black and Hispanic racial cues activated racial prejudice and depressed support for policies benefitting women. Among white conservatives, policy support was uniformly low across experimental conditions, pointing more toward principled opposition to such policies regardless of how their beneficiaries are described.
Using 1987 national sample survey data that included a large black oversample, we reexamine black-white differences in sociopolitical participation. We hypothesized that increases in black empowerment would affect the level of black sociopolitical participation and change the nature of black-white differences in political behavior. The results show that blacks in high-black-empowerment areas--as indicated by control of the mayor's office--are more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the results show that empowerment influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation to politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs. We discuss the results' implications for theoretical interpretations of when and why black sociopolitical behavior differs from that of whites.
The increasing public attention paid to Supreme Court nominations has elevated the salience of Senate confirmation battles, raising interesting questions about the impact of constituency preferences on senators' voting behavior. In this article, we explore this relationship using a logistical regression model to examine the impacts of African-American constituency size and the proximity of reelection on the roll call behavior of senators on the Clarence Thomas confirmation vote. Our analyses indicate that these factors were both statistically and substantively significant in the Thomas case. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of such findings.
Globally, there is a significant gender gap in political engagement between men and women; however, this gender gap varies both across countries and within countries over time. Previous research has argued that the inclusion of women in elite political positions encourages women’s political engagement at the citizen level—by augmenting women’s symbolic representation—and can reduce this gender gap. Using Afrobarometer data from 20 African countries across four waves of surveys from 1999 to 2008, we employ an interactive multilevel model that controls for the sex of the respondent, the percentage of women in the legislature, and the interaction of these two variables. We find that as women’s descriptive representation increases, the political engagement gender gap diminishes. This finding is robust across several measures of political engagement. Our findings suggest that the incorporation of women into political institutions encourages the political engagement of women at the citizen level.
In this study we extend previous research on the impact of constituency preferences on the roll-call behavior of senators during Supreme Court con firmations by examining the 1967 vote on Thurgood Marshall. In contrast to the later case of Clarence Thomas, we find that constituent racial characteristics (as measured by African-American percentage of state popula tion) had a significant negative impact in the Marshall case. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of these findings, and what they illuminate about the changing nature of the Southern Democratic coalition.
This article explores the basis of opinion formation and public attitudes toward recent Supreme Court nominees. The high salience of several re cent Court nominations has transformed the selection process from an elite affair to one with a popular dimension. We develop a model of opinion-holding in response to the Rehnquist, Bork, Souter, and Thomas nominations. We find that education and having an opinion about the president are strongly associated with opinion-holding about the nomi nees. We also find that presidential approval, party identification and ideology are all highly related to approval of the nominees. The influence of age, race, and gender on opinion-holding and evaluation tends to vary with the nomination. Of particular interest is the strong link we find be tween presidential evaluation and nominee evaluation. Presidents serve as important cues for those who have opinions about Court nominees.
This study tests the hypothesis that collective descriptive representation has important benefits for strengthening and legitimizing democratic society. Specifically, we test whether increased proportions of collective female descriptive representation in the statehouse and the presence of a female state executive are important to female citizens' attitudes toward government responsiveness, or external efficacy. We hypothesize that an increase in female collective descriptive representation in the legislative and state exec- utive branches of government will increase female citizens' external efficacy but will be unimportant to males. We pooled American National Election Studies (ANES) data from 1988 to 1998 and used ordered probit techniques to test the hypothesis. In addition to our main independent variable of interest, our model includes state political culture, dyadic descriptive representation, dyadic substantive representation, sociodemograph- ics, political participation, strength of partisanship, and electoral dummy variables as controls. Our results confirm that higher levels of collective female descriptive represen- tation promote higher values of external efficacy for female citizens, suggesting that col- lective female descriptive representation has important benefits to a democratic society.
A common assumption people make about American elections is that women voters will be the most likely source of support for female candidates, a phenomenon referred to as the “gender affinity effect.” Using National Election Study (NES) data from 1990 to 2000, this project expands our understanding of forms that this affinity effect can take by examining two underutilized measures of reactions to candidates: information and candidate affect scores. The author also considers the impact of political party on women's and men's attitudes toward female candidates and examines whether any gender affinity effect in reactions to female candidates is related to people's voting decisions.
We report the results of an experiment involving 820 randomly sampled adults. Half heard about a female Republican candidate for Congress. The other half learned of an otherwise identical male candidate. Democrat and Independent voters were more likely to trust, think qualified, view as a leader, and vote for the female Republican (contrasted with the male Republican). On the other hand, being female led to associations that hurt Republican women within their own party. We augment our experimental results by providing evidence that Republican women have done significantly worse than Democratic women in winning nominations in open-seat congressional districts.
While a substantial literature explores gender differences in participation in
the United States, Commonwealth countries and Western Europe, little attention
has been given to gender’s impact on participation in the developing
world. These countries have diverse experiences with gender politics: some have
been leaders in suffrage reforms and equal rights, while, in others, divorce has
only recently been legalized. This article examines the relationship between
gender and participation in seventeen Latin American countries. Many core
results from research in the developed world hold in Latin America as well.
Surprisingly, however, there is no evidence that economic development provides
an impetus for more equal levels of participation. Instead, the most important
contextual factors are civil liberties and women’s presence among the
visible political elite.
Do senators respond to the preferences of their state's median voter or only to the preferences of their copartisans? We develop a method for estimating state-level public opinion broken down by partisanship so that scholars can distinguish between general and partisan responsiveness. We use this to study responsiveness in the context of Senate confirmation votes on Supreme Court nominees. We find that senators weight their partisan base far more heavily when casting such roll call votes. Indeed, when their state median voter and party median voter disagree, senators strongly favor the latter. This has significant implications for the study of legislative responsiveness and the role of public opinion in shaping the members of the nation's highest court. The methodological approach we develop enables more nuanced analyses of public opinion and its effects, as well as more finely grained studies of legislative behavior and policy making.
How do Americans evaluate potential US Supreme Court candidates? Using a novel, two-part conjoint experiment, I show that respondents put high importance on the political leanings of potential Court candidates, a finding in contrast with the scholarly view that the public views the Court as different from other, more political institutions. Indeed, when respondents are given information about a nominee’s partisan leanings, they rely extensively on that information in deciding whether to support the candidate, whether they trust the candidate, and whether they find the candidate qualified. By contrast, when partisan information is withheld, respondents appear to use other kinds of signals, such as race, to fill in the gaps. Those who are most knowledgeable about the Court are most influenced by these partisan signals, providing further support for the importance of political heuristics. The results suggest that the public’s evaluation of judicial nominees is more in line with how it evaluates other political actors. They also suggest that even candidates with excellent qualifications need not garner bipartisan public support.
Current research shows that female legislators serve as role models for women. Understudied is how and the extent to which female ministers inspire women to participate in politics. We argue that with their high visibility and greater ability to influence policy, female ministers also serve as role models, but their influence differs depending on the form of political engagement. Using the World Values Survey and additional national-level variables, we employ multilevel modeling techniques to explore how women in the cabinet influence various forms of women's political engagement. We find that the proportion of women in the cabinet has a stronger effect on participation than the proportion of women in parliament. All else being equal, a higher proportion of women in the cabinet increases women's conventional participation (voting and party membership), petition signing, and engagement in peaceful demonstrations, but it does not influence women's participation in strikes or boycotts. Our findings add to current studies of women's political representation, in which ministerial representation is often underexplored or not differentiated from parliamentary representation, and help distinguish various forms of participation. Future research should consider examining a wider variety of women's political roles in other areas of the political arena.
We examine newspaper coverage of the US Supreme Court confirmation process to investigate whether Sonia Sotomayor received different coverage than other nominees due to her status as a minority woman. Sotomayor was the only justice seated over the last three decades who received extensive attention to her race and gender, and her coverage was more negatively toned than that received by other nominees. Compared to her counterparts, the press downplayed her intellectual abilities, devoted more negative attention to her judicial temperament, and suggested she would struggle to adjust to her new role. We examine explanations for why Sotomayor received different coverage and conclude that the intersectionality of ethnicity and gender best explains the media’s characterization of her.
What factors influence how the public judges judicial nominees? In this article we use an experimental approach to examine how variations in the qualifications and ideological and partisan divisiveness of a federal appellate court nominee affect support for confirmation of that nominee. Our results suggest that while both factors matter in evaluations of judicial nominees, the divisiveness and subjects' ideology tend to be more important than qualifications. Moreover, we find evidence that the effect of qualifications, ideology, and divisiveness are conditional on institutional legitimacy. Those who hold the federal courts in high regard tend to weigh qualifications and judiciousness more than ideology. Those who hold federal courts with less regard tend to weigh ideology more than qualifications and judiciousness. Finally, we find evidence that subjects appear to view ideological moderation as an important qualification for office.
Before Supreme Court nominees are allowed take their place on the high Court, they must face a moment of democratic reckoning by appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Despite the potential this holds for public input into the direction of legal change, the hearings are routinely derided as nothing but empty rituals and political grandstanding. In this book, Paul M. Collins, Jr., and Lori A. Ringhand present a contrarian view that uses both empirical data and stories culled from more than seventy years of transcripts to demonstrate that the hearings are a democratic forum for the discussion and ratification of constitutional change. As such, they are one of the ways in which “We the People” take ownership of the Constitution by examining the core constitutional values of those permitted to interpret it on our behalf.
Does public opinion influence Supreme Court confirmation politics? We present the first direct evidence that state-level public opinion on whether a particular Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed affects the roll-call votes of senators. Using national polls and applying recent advances in opinion estimation, we produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of 10 recent Supreme Court nominees in all 50 states. We find that greater home-state public support does significantly and strikingly increase the probability that a senator will vote to approve a nominee, even controlling for other predictors of roll-call voting. These results establish a systematic and powerful link between constituency opinion and voting on Supreme Court nominees. We connect this finding to larger debates on the role of majoritarianism and representation.
Theories of social-group behavior and issue salience are merged to introduce the idea of group-salient issues. Certain women's issues in the 1992 Senate elections were salient only to women when voting in contests where one of the candidates was a woman. Logit analysis of voting for U.S. senator from the 1992 National Election Study and from Voter Research and Surveys state exit polls (VRS). Women's voting for female Senate candidates in 1992 was related to issues affecting uniquely women's interests where women might be perceived as more competent than men.
Theory: Group identity and issue salience theories are used to explore the impact of candidate gender on voting behavior in congressional elections. Hypotheses: Support for women congressional candidates will be higher among voters who share certain demographic and attitudinal characteristics. Methods: Logistic analysis of the 1992 American National Election Study data is conducted. Results: Women voters are more likely to support women House candidates than are men and are also more likely to use gender-related issue positions in determining their vote choice when there is a woman candidate. In Senate elections, issues are much more important to determining vote choice than in House elections. Here women again exhibit distinctly different issue concerns than men and employ a greater number of gender-related issue concerns in their evaluations.
There are two distinct bodies of research on candidate gender. The first argues that voters are not biased against female candidates. These studies are usually based on aggregate analyses of the success rates of male and female candidates. The second body of research argues that voters employ gender stereotypes when they evaluate candidates. These studies are usually based on experiments which manipulate candidate gender. This study seeks to unite these literatures by incorporating gender stereotypes and hypothetical vote questions involving two candidates in one model I argue that many voters have a baseline gender preference to vote for male over female candidates, or female over male candidates. Using original survey data, I find that this general predisposition or preference can be explained by gender stereotypes about candidate traits, beliefs, and issue competencies, and by voter gender. I also argue that this baseline preference affects voting behavior.
We develop and test a neoinstitutional model of Senate roll call voting on nominees to the Supreme Court. The statistical model assumes that Senators examine the characteristics of nominees and use their roll call votes to establish an electorally attractive position on the nominees. The model is tested with probit estimates on the 2,054 confirmation votes from Earl Warren to Anthony Kennedy. The model performs remarkably well in predicting the individual votes of Senators to confirm or reject nominees. Senators routinely vote to confirm nominees who are perceived as well qualified and ideologically proximate to Senators' constituents. When nominees are less well qualified and are relatively distant, however, Senators' votes depend to a large degree on the political environment, especially the status of the president.
Extending Edelman's (1988) analysis of the constructed, phenomenal nature of political spectacles, this research employs Q-methodology as a means of interrogating the range of meanings implicit in public reaction to televised hearings held by the U.S. Senate in connection with Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Results disclose a range of five alternative, subjective constructions of the same set of events. The accounts so revealed are examined in light of the diverse subjectivity they manifest as well as in terms of their ties to race and gender cleavages within the viewing audience. A concluding discussion makes note of the implications for the further analysis of politics as spectacle.
Research on black representation in Congress emphasizes the meterial gains associated with black office holding over the intangible goods associated with citizen's ability to identify racially with their legislators. This article considers the effect of descriptive representation on the relationships among citizens, legislature, and the Congress. With data from the 1980-1998 ANES, I show that whites and blacks differ in the value they place on desciptive representation. White constituents more favorably assess and are more likely to contact representatives with whom they racially identify. This tendency is partially explained by racial differences in legislators' ideological profiles, but also reflects extrapolicy and explicit racial concerns. Black constituents place less significance on descriptive representation, although they are more likely to contact black representatives. Although the relationships between legislators and their constituents are influenced by race, perceptions of Congress as an institution are not affected by constituents' ability to identify recially with their representatives.
Linguistic heritage, cultural similarities, and experiences as ethnic minorities link Latinos in the United States, but distinctions on national origin, nativity, and geographic distribution may yield political differences. Previous investigations of Latino heterogeneity as a catalyst for unity or division are limited to narrow issue domains and the set of elections characterized by within-group diversity. It remains unclear whether Latinos will respond cohesively to co-ethnic cues in national politics. Using data state-level Web search volumes related to Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court, we assess the extent to which Latino national origin within the states corresponds to expressed interest in her. We find the relative size of the Puerto Rican population predicts interest in Sotomayor's nomination above the positive effects predicted by panethnic Latino population. The results indicate heterogeneity in Latino political orientations and simultaneously show that differential responses to co-ethnic cues among Latinos may be reinforcing rather than oppositional.[[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): Table of the Highest Circulating Newspapers in Each State.]
During the past decade, racial/ethnic minority women have made significant strides in U.S. politics, comprising large portions of their respective minority delegations both in Congress and in state legislatures. This trend has been particularly evident in the growing political presence of Latinas, yet scholars have offered no clear explanations for this electoral phenomenon—until now.
In The Latina Advantage, Christina E. Bejarano draws on national public opinion datasets and a close examination of state legislative candidates in Texas and California to demonstrate the new power of the political intersection between race and gender. Underscoring the fact that racial/ethnic minority women form a greater share of minority representatives than do white women among white elected officials, Bejarano provides empirical evidence to substantiate previous theoretical predictions of the strategic advantage in the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity in Latinas. Her evidence indicates that two factors provide the basis for the advantage: increasingly qualified candidates and the softening of perceived racial threat, leading minority female candidates to encounter fewer disadvantages than their male counterparts.
Overturning the findings of classic literature that reinforce stereotypes and describe minority female political candidates as being at a compounded electoral disadvantage, Bejarano brings a crucial new perspective to dialogues about the rapidly shifting face of America’s electorate.
This article outlines three theoretical arguments—socialization, status discontent, and elite cues—that generate competing predictions about the way context shapes gender attitudes. Using hierarchical analysis, we assess the power of these arguments in Latin America, a region that manifests considerable variation on our central explanatory variables and thus offers important theoretical leverage. We find men's gender attitudes to be highly contingent on elite cues and susceptible to backlash effects in response to women's economic advancement. Also, where women lack national representation, distrust of government promotes support for female leadership as an alternative to the discredited (male) establishment. The analysis supports existing individual-level explanations of gender attitudes and demonstrates a connection between diffuse democratic values and gender egalitarianism. The findings suggest that recent advances for female politicians in Latin America may be susceptible to reversal, and they illuminate strategies for strengthening women's equality in the region.
Race and gender are intimately intertwined in the lives of Black women in the United States. Race constructs the way Black women experience gender; gender constructs the way Black women experience race. In the Senate hearings that pitted the word of Clarence Thomas against the sexual harassment accusations of Anita Hill, the great majority of Black women did not believe Hill's accusations. Our analysis will set this disbelief against a background of substantial Black unity on political issues in the United States, Black feminism, television coverage of the event, and Black women's reactions to that television coverage.
Contrary to the conclusion one might reasonably form from the primary White composition of all the major feminist organizations, Black women have usually given stronger support to the women's movement than Whites on surveys (see Table for self-identification as “feminist”). Even as early as 1970, 60% of Black women said they supported efforts to strengthen women's status in society, compared to only 37% of White women (Klein 1987: 26), and in 1972 67% said they were sympathetic to women's liberation groups, compared to only 35% of White women (hooks 1981: 148). Also contravening the impression one might form from the composition of feminist organizations, poor women and working class women are as likely as middle-class women to say on these surveys that they consider themselves “feminist.” The survey data are supported by indepth interviews among all classes of Black women.
Gender politics literature stresses the symbolic importance of electing more women to high-level political office. Despite references to the heightened legitimacy that women in politics bring to the political process, and the manner in which they affect constituents’ political attitudes and behavior, little empirical evidence exists regarding the actual benefits of symbolic representation. Using pooled National Election Study data from 1980 to 1998, I attempt to fill a void in the literature, exploring whether the presence of women officeholders affects constituents’ evaluations of their members of Congress, levels of political efficacy and trust in government, and propensity to participate politically. After controlling for party congruence between the representative and his/her constituent, I uncover little evidence of the independent symbolic effects scholars typically ascribe to women’s presence in Congress. Women represented by women tend to offer more positive evaluations of their members of Congress, but this difference does not consistently translate into political attitudes or behavior. The findings represent an initial attempt to use available survey data to explore the extent to which symbolic representation independently affects citizens’ political attitudes and engagement.
Little empirical research has investigated the influence of racial identification on Latino vote choice. This article examines this relationship controlling for socioeconomic and demographic factors. I argue that because race is central in determining the life chances and social positions of groups in the United States, racial self-identification influences the Latino voter's decision to cast a ballot for a coethnic candidate over a non-Latino candidate. Ordered probit models show that race is a significant predictor of Latino vote choice. The findings raise interesting questions about Latino bloc voting, candidate preference, and participation more broadly.
In recent years, popular commentators have suggested that the Republican party could narrow the gender gap by nominating women candidates. This proposition assumes that (at least some) women voters’ partisan identification may be trumped by an affinity with their gender. I evaluate the claim that women voters are often induced to cross party lines on election day to support a woman candidate. Analyzing more than a decade of men’s and women’s voting behavior when male and female candidates face one another, I offer evidence that female candidates gain marginally greater support from their own gender. In a relationship not present with other male or female candidates, Democratic women candidates who face GOP men strongly benefit from Republican women voters’ crossover support.
This paper analyzes voting in five 1982 elections in which women ran as major party candidates for high-level offices: Governor in Vermont and Iowa; and U.S. Senator in Missouri, New York, and New Jersey. Results indicate that the sex of the candidate generally has little impact on voting and that solid women candidates can attract cross-over votes, while weaker ones can lose them. The implications of these results are discussed in the concluding section.
The rise of the Internet has radically altered survey research by changing how we think about sampling, driving down the cost of interviewing, and creating new ways of asking questions. This technology has also opened the way to a new style of cooperatively organized survey research. Projects such as the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) involve collaborations of dozens of research teams that can collect very large samples and many smaller surveys tailored to the research questions of particular teams. This review examines the organization and key findings of these projects as well as their sampling methodology and its validity. Of particular importance, this article offers a direct comparison of the CCES with actual election results and the American National Election Studies (ANES), showing that the new survey approach yields highly accurate results that replicate the correlation structure of the ANES.
This article outlines a cognitive-affective model of the role of social groups in political thinking. The model is based on the assumptions that people have stored information and emotional reactions to social groups, and that people are purposive in their thinking about social groups in the sense that they are interested in understanding what various groups have obtained and whether it is deserved. The process through which social groups influence political thinking varies significantly depending upon whether an individual identifies with the group in question. Generally, people are more inclined to feel sympathetic towards the groups to which they belong. These ideas are illustrated with an empirical analysis that focuses on women's issues and makes use of data collected in the 1984 National Election Study Pilot Study.
In the past two decades, numerous studies have tested empirically the normative theory of descriptive race representation. Here, we focus specifically on one aspect of descriptive representation—the relationship between increased racial representation and institutional legitimacy. Does greater racial diversity within a political institution increase its reservoir of good will? Using a novel experimental design centered on the federal courts, we find that greater descriptive representation for blacks causes increased legitimacy for the institution among African Americans. However, we also find that white support declines under the same experimental condition. In probing our data further, we discover that increased diversity does not impact blacks and whites in the same manner across the ideological spectrum. Rather, a person's ideology mediates how he or she assesses racial diversity on the bench. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings.