A Supreme Motivation: The Drivers of Senate Confirmation Vote Behavior from Bork to Jackson

In recent years, the confirmation process of Supreme Court nominees has been more consistently polarized than any other time in our country’s history. This study attempts to answer the research question of what factors influence Senators’ Supreme Court confirmation voting behavior by examining the trends of the Supreme Court confirmation processes starting from Robert Bork — the starting point for the trend of a contested Supreme Court nomination process. This study utilizes logistic regression analysis to examine a unique data set containing information on senators’ party relation to the president, public opinion poll data regarding the nominee, a judicial polarity score for the nominee, the year of the confirmation vote, and the senators’ vote to confirm or reject the nominee for the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork to Ketanji Brown Jackson. Through the methods utilized above, I find that the president’s party in relation to the senator and the public support for a nominee have a significant, positive effect on the probability of a vote to confirm a Supreme Court nominee while the polarity level of a nominee at the time of the confirmation vote has a significant, negative effect on the probability of a vote to confirm a Supreme Court nominee.