This project investigates how the 2009 confirmation hearings on Supreme Court nominee Sonia M. Sotomayor might affect political and racial attitudes. This information will be collected through a pre- and post-hearing national survey of 1100 adult citizens along with an oversample of 500 blacks and 500 Hispanics. The project specifically examines political and racial attitudes toward racial and ethnic minority groups as well as political and racial attitudes of racial and ethnic minority groups before and after the hearings. This study thus uses the Sotomayor hearings to investigate dormant attitudes toward law and the courts and whether the hearings generated particular concerns about the Court and its decisions, federalism, civil rights and liberties, and race relations.
The project measures evaluations of the nominee and the confirmation hearings, select Court decisions, members of Congress and the President, and attitudes toward racial and ethnic groups, gender, and the Court as well as perceptions of racial resentment. The design includes a re-interview of panelists from the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. These features enable an assessment of attitudes before the nomination, after the nomination but before Senate hearings, and after the Senate hearings. Finally, the project facilitates comparisons with findings from other surveys.
The project will have broad impacts by advancing new discovery about the interactions among and malleability of political and racial attitudes. In particular, results will illustrate how and why Supreme Court confirmation hearings affect both attitudes about racial and ethnic groups and attitudes of racial and ethnic groups toward the political system. The project will yield cross-sectional and longitudinal data that will enable scholars to compare the attitudes of whites, blacks, and Hispanics.
