Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/j.0022-3816.2004.00301.x

The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited

The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective.Charles R. Epp

Forest encroachment into savanna is occurring at an unprecedented rate across tropical Africa, leading to a loss of valuable savanna habitat. One of the first stages of forest encroachment is the establishment of tree seedlings at the forest-savanna transition. This study examines the demographic bottleneck in the seedlings of five species of tropical forest pioneer trees in a forest-savanna transition zone in West Africa. Five species of tropical pioneer forest tree seedlings were planted in savanna, mixed/transition, and forest vegetation types and grown for 12 months, during which time fire occurred in the area. We examined seedling survival rates, height, and stem diameter before and after fire; and seedling biomass and starch allocation patterns after fire. Seedling survival rates were significantly affected by fire, drought, and vegetation type. Seedlings that preferentially allocated more resources to increasing root and leaf starch (starch storage helps recovery from fire) survived better in savanna environments (frequently burnt), while seedlings that allocated more resources to growth and resource-capture traits (height, the number of leaves, stem diameter, specific leaf area, specific root length, root-to-shoot ratio) survived better in mixed/transition and forest environments. Larger (taller with a greater stem diameter) seedlings survived burning better than smaller seedlings. However, larger seedlings survived better than smaller ones even in the absence of fire. Bombax buonopozense was the forest species that survived best in the savanna environment, likely as a result of increased access to light allowing greater investment in belowground starch storage capacity and therefore a greater ability to cope with fire. Synthesis: Forest pioneer tree species survived best through fire and drought in the savanna compared to the other two vegetation types. This was likely a result of the open-canopied savanna providing greater access to light, thereby releasing seedlings from light limitation and enabling them to make and store more starch. Fire can be used as a management tool for controlling forest encroachment into savanna as it significantly affects seedling survival. However, if rainfall increases as a result of global change factors, encroachment may be more difficult to control as seedling survival ostensibly increases when the pressure of drought is lifted. We propose B. buonopozense as an indicator species for forest encroachment into savanna in West African forest-savanna transitions.

Winners and losers

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The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change?

Do judicial dissents affect mass politics? The conventional wisdom is that unanimous rulings boost support for Supreme Court decisions, while division fuels popular opposition. However, empirical analysis of public reaction to unanimity and dissent is sparse, incomplete, and inconsistent. Through a series of survey experiments, I expand upon existing research on public opinion of judicial unity. I find that reaction to judicial consensus is dependent on the ideological salience of the issue involved and that, contrary to conventional wisdom and recent findings, dissent can foster acceptance of rulings among the Court’s opponents by suggesting evidence of procedural justice.

Judicial Consensus and Public Opinion: Conditional Response to Supreme Court Majority Size

Many recent studies of the judiciary and public opinion adopt a model that views court decisions as aggravating division within the public The authors question the image of Court as polarizer, arg

Reviving the Schoolmaster: Reevaluating Public Opinion in the Wake of Roe v. Wade

Do judicial dissents affect mass politics? Many people, including judges, scholars, political commentators, and public officials claim that they do. The conventional wisdom is that unanimous rulings boost support for court decisions, while judicial division fuels popular opposition. As such, it has been suggested that courts present a united front on controversial cases as a strategy for garnering support and quelling resistance. However, empirical analysis of the public perception of judicial unanimity and dissent is sparse, incomplete, and inconsistent.This dissertation is broadly guided by the question of whether unity/division among judges can in fact influence media coverage of and popular attitudes toward court decisions. In doing so, I consider both the role of the news media as an intermediary between the courts and the public and direct public reaction to information about court unity. Using a combination of existing and original data, I analyze newspaper coverage patterns to determine if judicial consensus has an independent effect on the visibility and favorability of Supreme Court coverage. While previous work has assumed that the correlation between coverage and division is the result of the most newsworthy cases producing the most divided outcomes, I find that dissent on the Supreme Court generates press coverage independent of other factors associated with a case's newsworthiness. Moreover, this dissertation is the first study to find that narrower Supreme Court majorities attract more critical coverage. In addition, using a series of original survey experiments from a nationally representative sample, I expand and improve upon existing research of the direct popular reaction to judicial unanimity and dissent. Though most previous work on this subject had found no link between judicial consensus and public opinion, recently published findings have suggested that unanimity does indeed boost agreement with Supreme Court decisions across a variety of issue areas. Breaking with this, I find that popular reaction to judicial consensus is highly dependent on the ideological salience of the issue involved and that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, dissent can actually foster acceptance of rulings among the Court's opponents by suggesting evidence of procedural justice. However, this effect of majority size on public opinion appears limited to the Supreme Court: I find no evidence of a similar effect at the lower court level.This dissertation improves upon the existing body of knowledge regarding the judiciary's role in the political world. Not only does it reveal potential evidence of a news media bias toward judicial conflict, its public opinion findings buck both the conventional wisdom and the extant literature. Rather than suggesting that unanimity generally leads to a more supportive populace, as the conventional wisdom argues, or that there is no connection at all, as much of the scholarly literature claims, my findings show that the relationship between judicial consensus is more nuanced and is frequently the opposite of what the conventional wisdom suggests.

/pdf/public-perceptions-of-judicial-unanimity-and-dissent-the-3u7cqrl646.pdf

Public Perceptions of Judicial Unanimity and Dissent: The Impact of Divided Court Decisions on the Mass Media and Public Opinion

Perceptions of a Polarized Court: How Division among Justices Shapes the Supreme Court's Public Image

Ads aired in judicial campaigns have traditionally been quite tame—largely positive and focused on candidate traits such as experience. Judicial norms against attacking opponents and against position taking help to explain this fact, but sometimes these norms are violated. In this research, we ask whether the factors that drive negativity and policy discussion are the same across judicial and other races. Using data compiled by the Wisconsin Advertising Project and the Wesleyan Media Project, we conduct a content analysis of state supreme court ads aired on television from 2006–2013 and compare these ads to those aired in gubernatorial and congressional campaigns. We find that the predictors of negativity and policy talk are similar, but judicial ads remain more positive and less policy-focused than non-judicial ads, a finding that supports the judicial norms explanation.

Michael F. Salamone

Papers

Judicial Consensus and Public Opinion: Conditional Response to Supreme Court Majority Size

Reviving the Schoolmaster: Reevaluating Public Opinion in the Wake of Roe v. Wade

Public Perceptions of Judicial Unanimity and Dissent: The Impact of Divided Court Decisions on the Mass Media and Public Opinion

Perceptions of a Polarized Court: How Division among Justices Shapes the Supreme Court's Public Image

Judicial Norms and Campaigns: The Content of Televised Advertisements in State Supreme Court Races