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Abstract
Media reports during the Trump administration charged that President Trump was nominating federal judges with deeper political backgrounds than those nominated in the past. These reports led to several questions: How common are political backgrounds among federal appellate judges? When, and under what conditions, do presidents select judges with political backgrounds? How do these backgrounds manifest during the judicial nomination and confirmation processes? This dissertation addresses these questions in three separate chapters. In the first substantive chapter, the political backgrounds of judges are defined and described by identifying indicators of political activity in the questionnaires submitted by judges to the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the second chapter, factors like confirmation environment and presidential characteristics are used to discover when judges with political backgrounds are likely to be selected. In the third, the Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaires are studied via automated text analysis to reveal the amount of political language judges use. Results reveal that political backgrounds are not uncommon among federal judges, but the selection of such judges can depend on the partisanship of the appointing president and the Senate confirmation environment. Further, certain background characteristics of judges can lead to differential uses of political language. This dissertation contributes greatly to our understanding of how “political” judges are and why that matters.