From Consent to Advice and Consent

Abstract

This study seeks to understand long-standing structural changes within the executive—Senate relationships that govern the judicial appointment process. Utilizing a new source of data that comprises district court appointments from 1901 through 2006, the analysis models the duration of selection and confirmation events to find evidence of interbranch constraint. Temporal variance and heteroskedasticity in these measures suggest that the last century of appointment activity can be divided into four distinct regimes that reflect a repeating cycle of executive independence and senatorial constraint, which in turn helps integrate existing accounts of change and conflict within the appointment process of federal judges.