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

Last week, I briefly blogged in the academic round-up about Gibson and Caldeira’s outstanding paper entitled “Supreme Court Nominations, Legitimacy Theory, and the American Public: A Dynamic Test of the Theory of Positivity Bias,” see here. The paper can be downloaded here. To recap, Gibson and Caldeira use a three-wave national survey of Americans to determine their views on the Supreme Court before the Alito confirmation hearings (time 1), during the hearings (time 2), and then after the hearings (time 3). In the study, Gibson and Caldeira continue the interview process with the same set of respondents during each of the different time periods. Obviously, they do not have 100% response rates at the later dates, but they determine statistically that the respondents at time 2 and time 3 are representative of the whole sample.

Now to the interesting part. In an earlier paper, Gibson, Caldeira, and Spence determined that the Supreme Court may have actually enhanced its institutional legitimacy after deciding Bush v. Gore. An interesting result, to be sure, but two of those authors now extend their research to examine the effects of confirmation hearings and primarily interest group advertisements on the the public’s views on the legitimacy of the Court. As I stated last week, the most interesting finding is that viewing advertisements during the Alito confirmation hearings negatively impacted the public’s views about the Supreme Court, and partisanship and/or support or opposition to Alito had no impact on public perception. In other words, support or opposition to Judge Alito did not impact people’s views of the Supreme Court. In addition, according to the authors, “[a]mong the best predictors of support for the Court are general political efficacy and lack of exposure to ads during the Alito dispute. Effects are also seen of democratic values (support for a multiparty system and political tolerance), and level of education.” While exposure to ads (both positive and negative) independently influenced public perception at time 3, paying attention to the confirmation hearings positively influenced public perception of the Court, though the latter variable had a marginal and insignificant effect according to the authors. Indeed, the ads had a corrosive effect on public opinion about the Court no matter how much an individual paid attention to the hearings.

The authors go even further to explain that their “findings suggest that perceptions of the ads may be endogenous in the sense that they are strongly influenced by expectations.” Put another way, people’s preconceived notions about whether the Court is a politically-oriented entity or whether it is “above politics” impact the responses that people have to the ads. Those who support the Court at time 1 are more likely to find that the ads are unfair, negative, and partisan at time 3. The typical political scientist who believes that the Court is highly political and that ideological and political considerations play a large role in the confirmation process are less likely to become disoriented by a “moderately politicized confirmation process in which the ideology of the nominee is widely discussed.” Another surprising, but somewhat unrelated finding, of the paper is that, though Americans believe it is important that Justices are impartial and fair, only 37.3% rate adherence and respect to existing Supreme Court decisions as “very important.” (Perhaps Justice Thomas is on to something.) After examining the data, the authors conclude that “politicized nomination processes do in fact detract from the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. . ., and that the corrosive effect seems not to be associated with the proceedings in the Senate.”

I believe this is a really important paper, and I complement the authors on their hard work in collecting the data. That said, I have some lingering questions for the authors. In my view, the timing of the authors’s time 1 interviews was unfortunate. The authors attempt to measure the influence of important events on the legitimacy of the Court, but the first wave of interviews occurred from “mid-May until mid-July, 2005.” Another important event occurred during that period: Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her intention to step down from the Court on July 1, 2005. As I recall, the media was raining accolades on Justice O’Connor as the first woman appointed to the Court, and reviewing her career with a great deal of reverence. I wonder whether her retirement and the accompanying media coverage around that event may have artificially boosted the public’s view of the Supreme Court? As other types of polling data suggest, the public’s views of government institutions and candidates can be fickle and can change from week-to-week. Although it may make no difference, I would humbly suggest to the authors that they test whether the pre-July 1 interviews are statistically different than the post-July 1 interviews in terms of support for the Court. Since the time 1 interviews are the benchmark with which to test the later time 3 interviews, an artificial boost of support from the retirement of Justice O’Connor would undermine the conclusions they reach after their time 3 interviews. A closely related query is whether the death of Chief Justice Rehnquist and the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts also could have had an impact on their interviews, though I would guess from the timing of the time 2 and time 3 interviews that any such influence would be marginal. Aside from these minor quibbles, I highly recommend this paper.