100 Years of Supreme Court Justice Replacements

 

Purpose:
With the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG), people lamented how a democratically appointed Justice was likely going to be replaced by a republican appointed justice. I wanted to see how frequently such things happened. 

 

Justices are chosen through presidential nomination and are presumed to reflect the political ideals of that president. With this assumption, this graph shows how frequently a justice is replaced by a politically similar candidate. “Democrat to Democrat” means that both the outgoing and justice were nominated by a Democratic president. “Democrat to Republican” represents the case we are likely to see with RBG—a outgoing Justice nominated by a Democrat will be replaced with a Republican-nominated Justice.

 

The supreme court process is a bit complicated and I struggled with how to represent this most clearly. I would be happy to hear suggestions on how I could have done it better. As it is, I think you need to have a general understanding of how the process works to interpret the graph.

 

Source(s) and Data:

I relied on several Wikipedia pages to get information about the justices, replacement reasons, political affiliations, and congress history (1, 2, & 3). I also used the government website for verification and more details (https://www.supremecourt.gov/). Here is the R code I used to wrangle the data and create the graph using ggplot2. If you prefer, here is an Excel file with the full data (more than the 100 years used for the graph).

 

Highlights and Considerations:

  • The average Justice serves 16.6 years (σ = 9.7). Most Justices retire (75%) as opposed to dying in office (15%).
  • This graph shows the political affiliation of the nominating president, not the affiliation of the nominated Justice.
  • Within the past 100 years, Democrats have occupied the presidency for 48 years (48%).
  • Of the 49 replaced Justices, 40.8% were nominated by a Democratic president and 85% confirmed by a Democratic-majority congress.
  • For 76% of replacement confirmations, the President and congress shared the same party affiliation.

 

Graphics:

I made the graphic in R using the package ggplot2. I used PowerPoint to add in the “details” section.

 

 

 

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