Twisted Roots: Cointegrated Explanations of Transformation within the Federal Judicial Appointment Process

Abstract

This analysis presents a macro-level time series analysis of transformation within the judicial appointment process that evaluates the political party, judicial agenda, and interest group accounts of change. The presence of cointegration between measures related to these three hypotheses requires a more complex vector error correction estimation strategy that can capture endogenous relationships within independent variables and at the same time explain the short and long term dynamics of selection and confirmation. The results suggest that the judicial agenda and party realignment offer the best explanations of selection variance and that presidential partisan unity and interest group mobilization are the most robust predictors of confirmation.