Conventional wisdom says that individuals’ ideological preferences do not influence Supreme Court legitimacy orientations. Most work is based on the assumption that the contemporary Court is objectively conservative in its policymaking, meaning that ideological disagreement should come from liberals and agreement from conservatives. Our nuanced look at the Court's policymaking suggests rational bases for perceiving the Court's contemporary policymaking as conservative, moderate, and even liberal. We argue that subjective ideological disagreement—incongruence between one's ideological preferences and one's perception of the Court's ideological tenor—must be accounted for when explaining legitimacy. Analysis of a national survey shows that subjective ideological disagreement exhibits a potent, deleterious impact on legitimacy. Ideology exhibits sensible connections to legitimacy depending on how people perceive the Court's ideological tenor. Results from a survey experiment support our posited mechanism. Our work has implications for the public's view of the Court as a “political” institution.

https://home.gwu.edu/~bartels/BartelsJohnstonAJPS.pdf

On the Ideological Foundations of Supreme Court Legitimacy in the American Public

Although scholars increasingly acknowledge a contemporaneous relationship between public opinion and Supreme Court decisions, debate continues as to why this relationship exists. Does public opinion directly influence decisions or do justices simply respond to the same social forces that simultaneously shape the public mood? To answer this question, we first develop a strategy to control for the justices' attitudinal change that stems from the social forces that influence public opinion. We then propose a theoretical argument that predicts strategic justices should be mindful of public opinion even in cases when the public is unlikely to be aware of the Court's activities. The results suggest that the influence of public opinion on Supreme Court decisions is real, substantively important, and most pronounced in nonsalient cases.

How Public Opinion Constrains the U.S. Supreme Court

The 2012 challenge to the Affordable Care Act was an unusual opportunity for people to form or reassess opinions about the Supreme Court. We utilize panel data coupled with as-if random assignment to reports that Chief Justice Roberts's decision was politically motivated to investigate the microfoundations of the Court's legitimacy. Specifically, we test the effects of changes in individuals' ideological congruence with the Court and exposure to the nonlegalistic account of the decision. We find that both affect perceptions of the Court's legitimacy. Moreover, we show that these mechanisms interact in important ways and that prior beliefs that the Court is a legalistic institution magnify the effect of updating one's ideological proximity to the Court. While we demonstrate that individuals can and did update their views for multiple reasons, we also highlight constraints that allow for aggregate stability in spite of individual-level change.

Chief Justice Roberts's Health Care Decision Disrobed: The Microfoundations of the Supreme Court's Legitimacy

Bartels and Johnston have recently presented evidence suggesting that the legitimacy of the Supreme Court is grounded in the ideological preferences and perceptions of the American people. In addition, they offer experimental data purporting to show that dissatisfaction with a single Court decision substantially diminishes the institution’s legitimacy. These findings strongly break with earlier research on the Court’s institutional support, as the authors recognize. The theoretical implications of their findings are profound. If the authors are correct that legitimacy is strongly dependent upon satisfying the policy preferences and ideological predilections of the American people, the essence of legitimacy is fundamentally altered. Consequently, we re-investigate the relationships among ideology, performance satisfaction, and Court legitimacy, unearthing empirical findings that diverge markedly from theirs. We conclude with some thoughts about how the Court’s “countermajoritarian dilemma” can be reconceptualized and recalculated, once more drawing conclusions sharply at odds with those of Bartels and Johnston.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2300515_code340994.pdf?abstractid=2300515&mirid=1

Is the u.s. supreme court's legitimacy grounded in performance satisfaction and ideology?*

The public perceives the Supreme Court to be a legal institution. This perception enables the Court's legitimacy-conferring function, which serves to increase public acceptance of its decisions. Yet, the public acknowledges a political aspect to the Court as well. To evaluate how the public responds to the different images of the Supreme Court, we investigate whether and how depictions of specifically partisan (e.g., Republican) Court rulings shape public acceptance of its decisions while varying institutional, legal, and issue characteristics. Using survey experiments, we find that party cues and partisanship, more so than the imprimatur of the Court, affect public acceptance. We also find that polarization diminishes the effect of party cues. Attributing a decision to the Court does little to increase baseline acceptance or attenuate partisan cue effects. The Court's uniqueness, at least in terms of its legitimacy-conferring function, is perhaps overstated.

/pdf/partisans-in-robes-party-cues-and-public-acceptance-of-2uzh6iybvd.pdf

Partisans in Robes: Party Cues and Public Acceptance of Supreme Court Decisions

While some previous studies have found that public support for the Supreme Court is related to the ideological direction of its decisions, these studies were based on data from the Warren Court era, a period of high profile judicial liberalism. Since then, the Court has grown much more conservative, although its decisions have carried a much lower profile. We show that the mass media have done little to allow ordinary Americans to follow this change. As a consequence, we find that public evaluations in the 1990s continued to reflect a 1960s under- standing of the Court, with liberals on racial and gender issues as well as those least fearful of crime evaluating the Court most favorably. Only those who are both knowledgeable and highly motivated to follow Court outputs tracked its rightward shift on issues that are important to them.

Joseph L. Smith

Papers

Issue Preferences and Evaluations of the U.S. Supreme Court