Choosing When to Choose: Explaining the Duration of Presidential Supreme Court Nomination Decisions

Although the selection of Supreme Court nominees is of tremendous importance, the amount of time it takes presidents to select nominees varies dramatically across nominations. We argue that the timing of nominations is a function of the political constraints the president faces, and we focus in particular on partisan or ideological disagreement between the president and the Senate. We test our argument using all Supreme Court nominations since 1882, and find that disagreement increases this duration. In addition, we control for a variety of other factors that can affect timing. We find that a newly elected president, a nominee's personal characteristics, and Senate rule changes also increase the length of the nomination stage. On the other hand, this stage becomes shorter as the Senate nears the end of each session and as the presidency's institutional capacity has increased over time.