In this short paper I present a few practical tips for producing better published graphs. These include: making labels big enough to read; avoiding legends and labeling lines directly; using small multiple plots; and using different line types and shapes to draw distinctions. I illustrate these suggestions by improving all a few example published graphs. Finally, I provide replication code for implementing these suggestions in \emph{ggplot}.

Appellate courts with discretionary dockets have multiple ways to review lower courts. We develop a formal model that evaluates the tradeoffs between “full review”—which features full briefing, oral arguments, and signed opinions—versus “quick review,” where a higher court can summarily reverse a lower court. We show that having the option of costless summary reversal can increase compliance by lower courts, but also distort their behavior compared to relying only on costly full review. When the higher court is uncertain about the lower court’s preferences, the threat of summary reversal can lead an aligned lower court to “pander” and issue the opposite disposition to that preferred by the higher court. Access to summary reversal can therefore harm the higher court in some circumstances. Our analysis provides a theoretical founda- tion for growing concern over the U.S. Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”—of which summarily reversals are a component—which has been empirically focused to date.

This paper provides a primer for estimating public opinion at the state level using the technique of Multilevel Regression and Postratification (MRP). We provide sample R code for creating estimates and give step-by-step instructions on setting up the data, running models, and collecting estimates.

Kevin McMahon's A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other examines the extent to which the current Supreme Court—and its conservative supermajority—departs from earlier courts in the extent to which it suffers from a “democracy gap.” McMahon persuasively argues that the current Court is different for two reasons. First, most of the justices in the conservative majority were appointed by presidents who did not win the popular vote and/or were confirmed by senators who represented fewer voters than the senators who opposed them. Second, the homogenization of nominee experience and background has created a “judicial aristocracy” in which the justices are experientially far removed from the elected branches. One puzzle this account raises is why this democracy gap took so long to emerge, given the institutional design of the Court. But given the current polarized state of American politics, the same forces that brought us to the reality of the conservative supermajority are unlikely to abate for quite some time.

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 towards 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.

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—the “characteristics approach”—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’s characteristics and the “costs” 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’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.

Do senators respond to the preferences of their state's median voter or only to the preferences of their co-partisans? We develop a method for estimating state-level public opinion broken down by partisanship so that we can distinguish between general and partisan responsiveness. We use these estimates to study responsiveness in the context of Senate confirmation votes on Supreme Court nominees. We find that senators more heavily weight their partisan base 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 allows more nuanced analyses of public opinion and its effects, as well as more finely grained studies of legislative behavior and policy-making.

We study the relationship between state-level public opinion and the roll call votes of
senators on Supreme Court nominees. Applying recent advances in multilevel modeling, we use national polls on nine recent Supreme Court nominees to produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of each nominee in all 50 states. We show that greater public support strongly increases the probability that a senator will vote to approve a nominee, even after controlling for standard predictors of roll call voting. We also find that the impact of opinion varies with context: it has a greater effect on opposition party senators, on ideologically opposed senators, and for generally weak nominees. These results establish a systematic and powerful link between constituency opinion and voting on Supreme Court nominees.

The Democrats' victory in the 2006 election has been compared to the Republicans' in 2004. But the Democrats actually did a lot better in terms of the vote. The Democrats received 54.8% of the average district vote for the two parties in 2006, whereas the Republicans only averaged 51.6% in 1994. The 2006 outcome for the Democrats is comparable to their typical vote shares as the majority party in the decades preceding the 1994 realignment. Nevertheless, the size of the Democrats' victory in the 2006 House elections has obscured the sizable structural disadvantages they faced heading into the elections. In this paper we document the advantages the Republicans had, examine how and to what extent the Democrats overcame it, and offer predictions as to whether the results of the 2006 election leveled the electoral playing field for 2008. Our calculations showed that the Democrats needed at least 52% of the vote to have an even chance of taking control of the House of Representatives.

Prior to the election we estimated the seats-votes curve for 2006 by constructing a model to predict the 2006 election from 2004, and then validating the method by applying it to previous elections (predicting 2004 from 2002, and so forth). We found that the Democrats in 2006 were always destined to receive fewer seats than their corresponding average vote share. They were able to gain control of the House by winning the largest average district vote by either party since 1990. Has the 2006 election removed the Republicans' structural advantages? While Republicans continue to win more close races, a preliminary analysis of the 2008 election suggests that the switch in incumbency advantage from the Republicans to the Democrats may nevertheless level the electoral playing field.