The Role of Nominee Gender and Race at U.S. Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings

We investigate an unexplored aspect of the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation process: whether questioning senators treat female and minority nominees differently from male and white nominees. Applying out-group theory, we argue that senators will ask female and minority nominees more questions about t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Law & society review 2018-12, Vol.52 (4), p.871-901
Main Authors: Boyd, Christina L., Ringhand, Lori A., Collins, Paul M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bias
Females
Gender
Group identity
Group theory
Hearings & confirmations
Judicial appointments
Justice
Legislators
Males
Minority & ethnic groups
Nominations
Partisanship
Philosophy
Political appointments
Political parties
Race
Racial differences
Segal, Jeffrey
Sex differences
Supreme Court decisions
Supreme courts
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Summary:We investigate an unexplored aspect of the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation process: whether questioning senators treat female and minority nominees differently from male and white nominees. Applying out-group theory, we argue that senators will ask female and minority nominees more questions about their "judicial philosophies" in an effort to determine their competence to serve on the Court. This out-group bias is likely to be exacerbated for nominees not sharing the senator's political party. Our results do not support racial differences, but they do provide strong evidence that female nominees receive more judicial philosophy-related questions from male senators. This effect is enhanced when the female nominee does not share the partisan affiliation of the questioning senator. Together, these findings indicate that female nominees undergo a substantively different confirmation process than male nominees. We further find that this effect may be most intense with nominees like Justice Sotomayor, whose identities align with more than one out-group.
ISSN:0023-9216
1540-5893
DOI:10.1111/lasr.12362