Scholars of the federal confirmations process have noted that the Senate is taking longer to confirm the president's nominees, and confirming fewer of them, than ever before. The existing theories of the confirmation process have not entirely explained the Senate's increasing delay, primarily because the existing theories make a number of assumptions that limit their usefulness. Current models assume a single-shot, complete information environment, and focus almost solely on the filibuster and majority voting as means of stalling or defeating nominations. They also explore only ideological incentives and ignore other motivations described in the literature. The result is that our current theories all predict either too many failures or none at all, and none explicitly envisage delay.
In this project, I first demonstrate that confirmation delay is not the province of institutionally-empowered senators, such as the median senator or the pivotal vote for invoking cloture on a filibuster. The Senate's rules provide ample parliamentary power to every senator to stall or even defeat a nomination without a majority or super-majority vote. I then argue that repeated interaction between the president and the Senate and some uncertainty about preferences is a more realistic view of the confirmation process. Finally, I argue that senators have several motivations when stalling or defeating a nomination, including partisanship and hostage-taking, and not just ideological goals.
With this new framework, I describe a new model of confirmations that not only allows for delay, but also describes the interaction between ideology and partisanship that produces it. Three predictions of the model are tested in several models of nominations to the federal bench and find broad empirical support. The implications for nominations have wide ranging consequences, especially for the importance we give to informal institutions, mixed motivations, and divided government in explaining national politics. Most significantly, the model shows that nominees that are ultimately confirmed bear much less ideological resemblance to the president than current theory predicts. This suggests that the president has substantially less impact on the executive and judicial branches than previously thought.