Buyer beware? Presidential success through Supreme Court appointments

One manner in which Presidents attempt to have an enduring policy influence is through the appointment of like-minded justices to the Supreme Court. T his article empirically examines Dahl's (1957) hypothesis that justices act ually support the policy preferences of the Presidents who appoint them. We study concordance with new data for measuring presidential preferences in the domains of social and economic policy and by incorporating the notion o f judicial change over time. We measure presidential preferences for the mo dern Presidents, Franklin Roosevelt through Bill Clinton, with a survey tak en from a random sample of political science scholars who study the Preside ncy. We measure the voting behavior of the President's Supreme Court appoin tees through their votes in civil liberties and economics cases from 1937 t o 1994. Presidents appear to be reasonably successful in their appointments in the short run, but justices on average appear to deviate over time away from the Presidents who appointed them.