The Effects of Information on the Accuracy of Presidential Assessments of Supreme Court Nominee Preferences

Abstract

Models of presidential success in the judicial appointment process assume that a president selects a nominee who will maximize his influence on the Court. The models assume that the president accurately assesses the preferences of potential nominees. We argue that these perceptions are subject to systematic errors. Specifically, the amount of information available to the evaluator (the president and his staff) of a Supreme Court nominee's policy preferences affects the accuracy of the evaluation. These models assume that the president and/or his staff can accurately predict the policy preferences of the potential nominees. We argue that the precision of these assessments is a function of the information available to the president and his staff. We test this hypothesis using the prior experience of the nominee as a measure of the information available to the president and those members of his staff assigned to investigate potential Supreme Court nominees. Using heteroskedastic probit, we find a significant relationship between the amount of information (measured as prior legislative, executive, judicial, and academic experience) and the accuracy of the assessments of the nominees' preferences. This relationships hold even after controlling for various factors including the salience the president attaches to the issues decided by the justice and the relative relationship between the preferences of the president, Senate, and the remaining sitting justices when the nomination was made.