@misc{149981,
  author = {Jonathan P. Kastellec and Charles Cameron and Lauren Mattioli},
  title = {Presidential Selection of Supreme Court Nominees: The Characteristics Approach},
  abstract = {<p>Despite the importance of every nomination to the Supreme Court, a unified theory that illuminates presidential selection of nominees across the modern political era remains elusive. We propose a new theory{\textemdash}the {\textquotedblleft}characteristics approach{\textquotedblright}{\textemdash}that envisions nominees as bundles of characteristics, such as ideology, policy reliability, and attributes of diversity. We formalize the theory, which emphasizes the political returns to presidents from a nominee{\textquoteright}s characteristics and the {\textquotedblleft}costs{\textquotedblright} of finding and confirming such individuals, and derive explicit presidential demand functions for these charac- teristics. Using newly collected data on both nominees and short list candidates, we estimate these demand functions. They reveal some striking and under-appreciated regularities in appointment politics. In particular, the substantial increase in presidential interest in the Supreme Court{\textquoteright}s policy output and the increased availability of potential justices with desired characteristics has led to significant changes in appointment politics and the composition of the Court.</p>
},
  year = {2019},
  journal = {Quarterly Journal of Political Science},
  url = {https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/TCOFXX},
  language = {eng},
}