Judicial Partisan Loyalty: A Novel Measure of Judicial Behavior and the Senate's Role in Moderating It

This paper attempts to understand whether the Senate has lived up to the framers' expectations by asking a fairly simple question: is a justice's level of support from the Senate during their confirmation predictive of that justice's level of partisan loyalty on the bench? In other words, does the Senate act as an effective screening mechanism against partisan judges? This paper introduces the Partisan Loyalty Score, a precise measurement and index of partisan loyalty for nearly every Supreme Court justice since 1937. This score serves as the dependent variable in this paper's empirical analyses. Senate support during the confirmation process (the percentage of "yes" votes a justice receives) serves as the independent variable.