How Will They Vote? Predicting the Future Behavior of Supreme Court Nominees, 1937-2006

Previous research suggests that the future behavior of nominees to the U. S. Supreme Court is relatively unpredictable, except for civil liberties cases. We devise a new measure of nominees' political ideology that more efficiently uses preconfirmation information about the nominees. The measure employs Segal-Cover scores (based on content analysis of contemporary newspaper editorials) as well as DW-NOMINATE indicators, and is scaled into the DW-NOMINATE space. The measure predicts confirmed nominees' overall immediate, short-term, and longer-term voting behavior, as well as voting in issue-specific domains, much better than do previous measures. It is particularly successful for nominees confirmed after 1957.