US Senate Votes on Clarence Thomas Confirmation

Description

Votes in the US Senate on Clarence Thomas nomination for the US Supreme Court

Format

A data frame with 100 observations on the following 6 variables.

State

State name

Senator

Senator name

Party

Party affiliation (D=Democrat or R=Republican)

ConfVote

Confirmation vote (Nay or Yea)

StateOpinion

Percentage of state residents supporting the choice

Vote

Numeric coding for vote (1=for or 0=against)

Details

Data from the U.S. Senate vote on October 15, 1991 to confirm Clarence Thomas to a position on the Supreme Court.

Source

These numbers are taken from Kastellec, J.P., Lax, J.R., and Phillips, J. (2010), "Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees," Journal of Politics, 72(3): 767-84. In this paper the authors used opinion polls and an advanced statistical method known as multilevel regression and poststratification to determine the StateOpinion levels.