for Demand Justice, January 2019
What We Want to Know:
Trump-skeptical conservative activists and pundits frequently cite the president’s power to appoint ideologues throughout the federal judiciary as a reason for their continued support for his administration. Any Republican — and especially a Republican who is willing to outsource much of his judicial selection to the Federalist Society — is better for these policy demanders than any Democrat on this dimension. Anecdotally, it certainly seems like Trump has consistently delivered conservative victories via his judicial appointments. But does this collection of anecdotes add up to data? In quantitative terms, how much is Trump delivering for the conservative base by shaping the federal judiciary on their terms?
What We Did:
In order to quantify Trump’s ideological pull on the federal judiciary, we use campaign finance (CF) scores compiled by political scientists Maya Sen and Adam Bonica. CF-scores are generated using the DIME (Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections) dataset, and allow for the estimation of ideological ideal points based on patterns in political donations (for Bonica and Sen’s academic application of CF-scores to judges and lawyers, click here). The key assumption in using CF-scores is that if a given individual — say, a judge — donates money to more liberal (conservative) candidates, it’s reasonable to infer that they have more liberal (conservative) policy preferences. By analyzing the campaign contributions that judges make, specifically the ideology of candidates the judges contribute to, Sen and Bonica estimate ideological point estimates for members of the federal judiciary. Judicial CF-scores are highly correlated with the Judicial Common Space scores Data for Progress analyzed here, and have been used in other analyses of Trump’s nominees here. For judges who had not previously made campaign contributions, scores were imputed using a variety of available covariates that are correlated with observed judicial CF-scores (such as their age, race, employment history, party of appointing president, and ideologies of home state senators and the judiciary committee chair who oversaw their confirmation). The imputations were estimated separately for Republican and Democratic presidencies, and were validated with a comparison of imputed values to over-imputed values (imputed values for which observed CF-scores are available).
What We Found:
Below, we show summary statistics for each president’s judicial appointments in the dataset from Nixon through Trump. At first glance, Trump’s appointments stand out as being conservative, white, and male relative to his predecessors — though they do not seem to be significantly younger than the appointments made by earlier presidents. Over 90 percent of Trump’s appointments so far have been white and three quarters have been men, combining for over 70 percent who are both white and male. Thirty-seven percent of Barack Obama’s appointments were white men.
Next, we plot the distributions of CF-scores for each president’s judicial appointees to district courts and courts of appeals, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. The median CF-score of each president’s appointments are shown with dots, the median score of each party’s appointments across the full time range are shown with vertical lines, and the number of appointments each president made are shown under their names. As the plot shows, judicial appointments have become more ideologically polarized over time by this metric, though this is possibly in part due to the fact that Congress has polarized over time and the scores are based on the ideology of campaign donation recipients.