Segal–Cover score

A Segal–Cover score is an attempt to measure the "perceived qualifications and ideology" of nominees to the United States Supreme Court. The scores are created by analyzing pre-confirmation newspaper editorials regarding the nominations from The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Wall Street Journal. Each nominee receives two scores that range from 0 to 1 based on the average score of all articles from these sources:

• Qualifications: 0 means unqualified and 1 means extremely qualified
  • Qualification scores are based on the characterization of each editorial as positive, neutral, or negative toward the nominee. Positive articles are coded as 1, neutral articles as 0.5, and negative articles as 0.[1]
• Ideology: 0 means most conservative, and 1 means most liberal.
  • Ideology scores are based on each editorial's characterization of the nominee as liberal, moderate, conservative, or not applicable. Articles characterizing the nominee as liberal are coded as 1, moderate as .5, conservative as 0; articles deemed not applicable are omitted from the ideology score.[1]

The Segal–Cover scoring was introduced by Jeffrey Segal and Albert Cover (both of Stony Brook University) in their 1989 article "Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices".[2][3] The scores have been updated by Segal to cover all nominees from Hugo Black in 1937 to Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.[4]

Segal and Cover found that the scores are strongly correlated with the subsequent votes of the justices. Because the scores are based on perceptions before the nominee takes a seat on the Court, they also provide "reliable measures of the ideological values of Supreme Court justices that are independent of the votes they later cast."[2] In a 1995 paper revisiting the Segal-Cover score, Segal and his coauthors concluded that the ideology score was significantly more accurate for justices who served during and after the Warren Court and cautioned that researchers analyzing the ideology of earlier justices should supplement the ideology scores of earlier judges with other methodologies and that "Scholars should be sensitive to changes in the legal, political, and social environments (which generate the newspaper reactions on which the scores are based) and use appropriate diagnostic tools to tease out their potential effects."[3]

The Segal–Cover perceived qualifications and ideology scores for all nominees to the Court since 1937:

Nom. Order	Nominee	Chief Justice	Senate Vote	Ideology Score	Qualifications Score	Nominator (Party)	Year
1	Hugo Black		67 – 18	0.875	0.160	Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat)	1937
2	Stanley F. Reed		Voice Vote	0.725	0.875	Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat)	1938
3	Felix Frankfurter		Voice Vote	0.665	0.965	Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat)	1939
4	William O. Douglas		62 – 4	0.730	0.820	Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat)	1939
5	Frank Murphy		Voice Vote	1.000	0.650	Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat)	1940
6	Harlan F. Stone	CJ	Voice Vote	0.300	1.000	Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat)	1941
7	James F. Byrnes		Voice Vote	0.330	0.800	Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat)	1941
8	Robert H. Jackson		Voice Vote	1.000	0.915	Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat)	1941
9	Wiley B. Rutledge		Voice Vote	1.000	1.000	Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat)	1943
10	Harold H. Burton		Voice Vote	0.280	0.930	Harry S. Truman (Democrat)	1945
11	Fred M. Vinson	CJ	Voice Vote	0.750	0.785	Harry S. Truman (Democrat)	1946
12	Tom C. Clark		73 – 8	0.500	0.125	Harry S. Truman (Democrat)	1949
13	Sherman Minton		48 – 16	0.720	0.355	Harry S. Truman (Democrat)	1949
14	Earl Warren	CJ	Voice Vote	0.750	0.855	Dwight D. Eisenhower (Republican)	1953
15	John M. Harlan II		71 – 11	0.875	0.750	Dwight D. Eisenhower (Republican)	1955
16	William J. Brennan, Jr.		Voice Vote	1.000	1.000	Dwight D. Eisenhower (Republican)	1956
17	Charles E. Whittaker		Voice Vote	0.500	1.000	Dwight D. Eisenhower (Republican)	1957
18	Potter Stewart		70 – 17	0.750	1.000	Dwight D. Eisenhower (Republican)	1958
19	Byron White		Voice Vote	0.500	0.500	John F. Kennedy (Democrat)	1962
20	Arthur J. Goldberg		Voice Vote	0.750	0.915	Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat)	1965
21	Abe Fortas		Voice Vote	1.000	1.000	Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat)	1965
22	Thurgood Marshall		69 – 11	1.000	0.835	Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat)	1967
23	Abe Fortas	CJ	45 – 43 *	0.845	0.635	Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat)	1968
24	Warren E. Burger	CJ	74 – 3	0.115	0.960	Richard M. Nixon (Republican)	1969
25	Clement Haynsworth, Jr.		45 – 55	0.160	0.335	Richard M. Nixon (Republican)	1969
26	G. Harrold Carswell		45 – 51	0.040	0.111	Richard M. Nixon (Republican)	1969
27	Harry A. Blackmun		94 – 0	0.115	0.970	Richard M. Nixon (Republican)	1970
28	Lewis F. Powell, Jr.		89 – 1	0.165	1.000	Richard M. Nixon (Republican)	1972
29	William Rehnquist		68 – 26	0.045	0.885	Richard M. Nixon (Republican)	1972
30	John Paul Stevens		98 – 0	0.250	0.960	Gerald Ford (Republican)	1975
31	Sandra Day O'Connor		99 – 0	0.415	1.000	Ronald Reagan (Republican)	1981
32	William Rehnquist	CJ	65 – 33	0.045	0.400	Ronald Reagan (Republican)	1986
33	Antonin Scalia		98 – 0	0.000	1.000	Ronald Reagan (Republican)	1986
34	Robert H. Bork		42 – 58	0.095	0.790	Ronald Reagan (Republican)	1987
35	Douglas Ginsburg		Withdrawn	0.000	0.320	Ronald Reagan (Republican)	1987
36	Anthony Kennedy		97 – 0	0.365	0.890	Ronald Reagan (Republican)	1988
37	David Souter		90 – 9	0.325	0.765	George H. W. Bush (Republican)	1990
38	Clarence Thomas		52 – 48	0.160	0.415	George H. W. Bush (Republican)	1991
39	Ruth Bader Ginsburg		96 – 3	0.680	1.000	Bill Clinton (Democrat)	1993
40	Stephen G. Breyer		87 – 9	0.475	0.545	Bill Clinton (Democrat)	1994
41	John G. Roberts	CJ	78 – 22	0.120	0.970	George W. Bush (Republican)	2005
42	Harriet E. Miers		Withdrawn	0.270	0.360	George W. Bush (Republican)	2005
43	Samuel Alito		58 – 42	0.100	0.810	George W. Bush (Republican)	2006
44	Sonia Sotomayor		68 – 31	0.780	0.810	Barack Obama (Democrat)	2009
45	Elena Kagan		63 – 37	0.730	0.730	Barack Obama (Democrat)	2010
46	Neil Gorsuch		54 – 45	0.110	0.930	Donald Trump (Republican)	2017
47	Brett Kavanaugh		50 – 48	0.070	0.400	Donald Trump (Republican)	2018

* The vote on Fortas for the Chief Justice position was on cloture and failed to receive the necessary two-thirds majority.

• A highlighted row indicates that the Justice is currently serving on the Court.

• A Senate vote in red text indicates that the nomination was blocked.

See also

• Ideological leanings of United States Supreme Court justices
• Judicial Common Space
• Supreme Court of the United States

References

1. Riley, Chad (2015). Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (PhD). The University of Texas at Arlington.
2. Segal, Jeffrey A.; Cover, Albert D. (June 1989). "Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices". The American Political Science Review. 83 (2): 557–565. doi:10.2307/1962405. JSTOR 1962405.
3. Segal, Jeffrey A.; Epstein, Lee; Cameron, Charles M.; Spaeth, Harold J. (August 1995). "Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Revisited". The Journal of Politics. 57 (03): 812–823. doi:10.2307/2960194.
4. Epstein, Lee; Walker, Thomas G.; Staudt, Nancy; Hendrickson, Scott; Roberts, Jason (February 11, 2019). "The U.S. Supreme Court Justices Database". Retrieved May 14, 2019.