Public Opinion and Supreme Court Justices

Andrew Gelman links to an interesting paper investigating the link between public opinion and the selection and confirmation of Supreme Court justices. It addresses questions like, "Should Bork blame public opinion for his failure to be confirmed?"; "Did public opinion seal Thomas's confirmation?" and, "Could Harriet Meiers have been confirmed?" 

The answers to these questions lie in an analysis of public opinion data compared to confirmation votes. There is quite a lot of variability from state-to-state in opinions of potential Justices, as displayed in this chart:

The charting and analysis is all done in R (using the lme4 package).

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science: The Next Supreme Court Justice