1

Paper

Delaying Justice(s): A Duration Analysis of Supreme Court Nominations Shipan, Charles R. Shannon, Megan L. Uploaded 07-16-2001 Keywords Hazard Model Spatial Model Supreme Court Nominations Abstract Presidents have great success when nominating justices to the Supreme Court, with confirmation being the norm and rejection being the rare exception. In this paper we show that while the end result of the confirmation process is that the nominee taking a seat on the Court, there is a great deal of variance in the amount of time it takes the Senate to approve the nominee. To derive a theoretical explanation of this underlying dynamic in the confirmation process, we draw on a spatial model of presidential nominations to the Court. We then use a hazard rate model to test this explanation, using data on all Supreme Court nominations and confirmations since the end of the Civil War. The hazard model is superior to alternative models such as probit, where information on right-censored nominations in our data would be lost. More specifically, the Cox proportional hazards model is a better fit for our data as compared to the Weibull, exponential, and log-logistic hazard models. Our paper thus makes two key contributions. First, it identifies the political factors that influence Supreme Court confirmations and the duration of the confirmation process. Second, it demonstrates the ways in which the nomination process affects the confirmation process.