THE SENATE AND JUSTICE THOMAS - A NOTE ON IDEOLOGY, RACE, AND CONSTITUENT PRESSURES

Several recent studies concluded that constituent preferences have a s ignificant impact on senators' roll call behavior on Supreme Court con firmation votes, but the exact nature of this influence is unclear. In this paper, Ianalyze analyze the Senate vote on Justice Clarence Thom as using ideological, demographic, and electoral measures of constitue nt pressures. The fact that both the interactive racial/reelection and the ideology variables remain significant in a combined model confirm s the importance of this matter for further research.