Ideological Congruity between Appointing Presidents and Supreme Court Justices, 1937-2008

Abstract

In keeping with Dahl’s (1957) concern for a link between judicial behavior and democratic processes, we examine the relationship between appointing presidents and Supreme Court justices. By using ideal points that place all actors in the same scale, and while controlling for factors that constrain presidential selection, we locate evidence of a strong connection between ideology scores for appointing presidents and career voting scores for justices. We then extend our work by employing time series regression to illustrate that a justice will drift from the ideology of an appointing president with each additional term served, even after controlling for shifts in the ideology of political institutions. Term-by-term analysis further reveals that the beginning of the 11th term represents the point at which ideological drift becomes highly significant, a finding that may be of interest to scholars who espouse term limits for Supreme Court justices.