Congratulations to Morgan Herlihy and Michael Nelson on receiving the 2026 Neal Tate Award for the best judicial politics article presented at the 2025 SPSA conference! Their article, “Judging Judicial Nominees,” recently published in Political Research Quarterly, discusses how public support for judicial nominees is shaped largely by policy agreement between citizens and nominees. Confirmation hearings play an important role by helping the public assess nominees’ views. When nominees are clear about their positions—especially on issues like abortion—citizens’ policy preferences strongly predict support for confirmation. When nominees avoid answering questions, policy views matter less, and citizens rely more on cues such as past experience and interest group endorsements. Survey experiments show that these alternative signals are especially influential when nominees are evasive, underscoring the continued importance of confirmation hearings in shaping public opinion.
