Lobbying for Justice: Organized Interests Supreme Court Nominations, and United States Senate

Abstract

Theory: By providing information to senators and their constituents about how nominees are likely to behave on the Court if confirmed; and by communicating information about constituents' preferences through grassroots lobbying campaigns, interest groups help shape senators' preferences for nominees and inform them about the appropriate importance to attach to constituency preferences. Hypotheses: We argue that interest groups play an important role in shaping senators' decisions. The empirical implication of our argument is that unless some account of groups' lobbying efforts is included in models used to explain congressional voting, the importance of traditional predictors such as ideology and constituency will be exaggerated. Method: Using data from surveys of organized interests' activities on the Bork, Souter, and Thomas nominations, we estimate the coefficients for our model with a two-stage OLS-probit procedure. Results: Our empirical analyses indicate that interest group lobbying has a statistically significant effcct on senators' confirmation votes on all three nominations.