Ideology on the U.S. District Courts: Reexamining Presidential and Senatorial Appointment Power

Abstract

Unlike U.S.appellate courts, scholars of the American federal judiciary typically lack ideological estimates for district court judges that are derived directly from their behavior. Rather, scholars have primarily relied upon proxy measures based upon the preferences of a judge’s appointing president or those of home-state senators in the event senatorial courtesy is in effect. Nevertheless, senatorial courtesy is a norm, and norms can be broken. It remains an open question whether home-state senators genuinely constrain the president when it comes to the ideological tenor of appointees to the district courts. We produce novel ideal point estimates for 1,680 U.S.~district court judges appointed between 1913 and 2009 based upon their votes in approximately 100,000 cases, in addition to contextual factors unique to judges and the process by which they were appointed. We map these ideal points into the Judicial Common Space and make them publicly available to American courts scholars. These ideal points differ meaningfully compared to previous proxy measures and improve predictive power in judge voting behavior. Importantly, despite a battery of statistical tests, we find that senatorial courtesy appears to play a minimal role with respect to the revealed preferences of U.S.~district court judges compared to the role the president’s ideology plays. If senatorial courtesy indeed constrains presidents in the separation of powers game, it is likely on some other, non-ideological dimension.