In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Irem B. A. Örsel, covers the new article by Christina L. Boyd, Paul M. Collins, Jr., Lori A. Ringhand, Gender, Race, and Interruptions at Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings.
Conversations are a primary way for human beings to interact, exchange ideas, and understand each other. In an effective conversation, people respect and listen to one another without excessive interruption. While brief interruptions occur naturally in the flow of conversations, when these interruptions become longer and more extensive, they can affect the progress of the exchanges and turn them into a monologue. Sometimes they do even more, revealing deeper underlying issues such as power inequalities and societal biases. These bias-based interruptions may happen in any conversational setting from formal to casual. The United States Supreme Court confirmation hearings held before the Senate Judiciary Committee are among the settings where these interruptions occur.
Supreme Court confirmation hearings act as a forum for senators to interview a Supreme Court nominee to decide whether a nominee should be given a seat on the Supreme Court. As with other conversational settings, some people may interrupt more than others. The important point here is who interrupts more than others. In a recent APSR letter, Christina L. Boyd, Paul M. Collins, Jr., and Lori A. Ringhand focus on this difference by exploring whether gender and racial bias impacts the rate of interruption at these hearings.
In their letter, the authors highlight that the interruptive behavior happens in Supreme Court confirmation hearings even though they are one of the most public and visible political events. They use original data to examine this issue. The data include all publicly available senator and nominee hearing statements before the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1939 to 2022, consisting of about 40,000 statements.
“The authors are the first scholars to analyze biased interruptions from senators and nominees, simultaneously.“Boyd, Collins, and Ringhand look at the percentage of intrusive interruptions, which are attempts to take over the conversational floor from the speaker. Critically, the authors find that both male and white senators and nominees more frequently interrupt female and person of color speakers, respectively, than other speakers. The authors show male senators interrupt female nominees from the opposite party more frequently. Similarly, white senators interrupt people of color from a different political party more than white same party nominees. This finding is especially important, showing that the senators interrupt people of color nominees from a different party considerably more than white nominees from the opposite party. The authors show that nominees interrupt senators’ speeches, too, but only approximately half as much as senators interrupt them. Male nominees interrupt female senators from a different party more often than male senators or female senators from the same party. Likewise, white nominees interrupt senators of color from a different party more often than they interrupt senators of color from the same party. Racial differences are again significant since white nominees interrupt senators of color from opposite parties three times more.
This letter is notable in its focus on gender and racial perspectives of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The authors are the first scholars to analyze biased interruptions from senators and nominees, simultaneously. They delve into both gendered and racial effects, rather than focusing exclusively on gender, like prior scholarship. Finally, the authors demonstrate that these biased interruptions do not happen only in private conversations; rather they can happen in high-profile events and visible environments with heavy media attention and public interest. All in all, both senators and nominees use this power play, which is targeted at female and person of color speakers, to take over others’ speaking turns and prevent them from controlling the flow of information during one of the most important political and legal events in the United States.
- Irem B. A. Örsel is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at Tulane University. She holds a Bachelor’s in Philosophy from Middle East Technical University (Turkey) and a Master’s in Political Science from Eastern Illinois University. Her primary research interests are comparative political behavior, populism, judicial behavior, and computational social science methods. She focuses comparatively on Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and the United States of America. Irem is a first-generation student and an advocate of public service and public scholarship.
- BOYD, CHRISTINA L., PAUL M. COLLINS, and LORI A. RINGHAND. 2024. “Gender, Race, and Interruptions at Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings.” American Political Science Review, 1–8.
- About the APSA Public Scholarship Program.