The Supreme Court and Local Public Opinion

TLDR: The authors examined the effect of Supreme Court decisions in the local communities where the controversies began and found that a substantial number of residents heard about the Court's decision and subsequently changed their evaluation of the Supreme Court, especially those who live in the immediate community.

Abstract: people pay attention and use this information in their evaluation of the Court. The research is based on a series of two-wave panel studies that examine the effect of Supreme Court cases in the local communities where the controversies began. The results show that a substantial number of residents heard about the Court's decision and subsequently changed their evaluation of the Supreme Court, especially those who live in the immediate community. The results suggest that we need to consider other circumstances in which people hear about and care about Supreme Court decisions. R esearch on the relationship between specific Supreme Court decisions and public support for the Court has been frustrated by the apparent public ignorance of all but the most controversial and visible cases (see Caldeira 1991). In the standard account, citizens are portrayed as quite willing to offer an opinion about the institution, but they do so without knowledge of many individual decisions. Thus, many scholars conclude that support for the Court rests upon more enduring attitudes about the legitimacy of the Court in the system of government rather than on agreement or disagreement with specific decisions. Although most research suggests that the majority of Court decisions go unnoticed, the possibility that these decisions influence attitudes toward the institution is not without some support in the literature. The connection has been established in experimental research (Mondak 1991, 1992; Segal 1995) but has not been very well documented outside the laboratory. The reason is straightforward: If Court decisions are not common knowledge, by definition they can have no effect. One major obstacle is that most national surveys do a poor job of identifying conditions in which people are motivated to learn about specific Court decisions and in which they have sufficient access to information about them (but see Franklin and Kosaki 1995; Franklin, Kosaki, and Kritzer 1993; Hoekstra and Segal 1996). Consequently, we may be underestimating the importance of citizens' reactions as an element of support for the Court. One instance in which interest and access to information are likely to be high is the local communities where a controversy began. People should be more interested in cases that involve members of their own community than in cases that involve individuals or groups from somewhere else (Boninger, Berent, and