No abstract

The purpose of this research is to examine theories of diffuse support and institutional legitimacy by testing hypotheses about the interrelationships among the salience of courts, satisfaction with court outputs, and diffuse support for national high courts. Like our predecessors, we are constrained by essentially cross-sectional data; unlike them, we analyze mass attitudes toward high courts in eighteen countries. Because our sample includes many countries with newly formed high courts, our cross-sectional data support several longitudinal inferences, using the age of the judicial institution as an independent variable. We discover that the U.S. Supreme Court is not unique in the esteem in which it is held and, like other courts, it profits from a tendency of people to credit it for pleasing decisions but not to penalize it for displeasing ones. Generally, older courts more successfully link specific and diffuse support, most likely due to satisfying successive, nonoverlapping constituencies.

Participation as amicus curiae has long been an important tactic of organized interests in litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court. We analyze amicus curiae briefs filed before the decision on certiorari and assess their impact on the Court's selection of a plenary docket. We hypothesize that one or more briefs advocating or opposing certiorari increase the likelihood of its being granted. We test this hypothesis using data from the United States Reports and Briefs and Records of the United States Supreme Court for the 1982 term. The statistical analysis demonstrates that the presence of amicus curiae briefs filed prior to the decision on certiorari significantly and positively increases the chances of the justices' binding of a case over for full treatment—even after we take into account the full array of variables other scholars have hypothesized or shown to be substantial influences on the decision to grant or deny.

It is conventional in research on the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court to rely on a survey question asking about confidence in the leaders of the Court to indicate something about the esteem with which that institution is regarded by the American people. The purpose of this article is to investigate the validity of this measure. Based on a nationally representative survey conducted in 2001, we compare confidence with several different measures of Court legitimacy. Our findings indicate that the confidence replies seem to reflect both short-term and long-term judgments about the Court, with the greater influence coming from satisfaction with how the Court is performing at the moment. We suggest a new set of indicators for measuring the legitimacy of the Court and offer some evidence on the structure of the variance in these items.

Scholarship on electoral turnout has long emphasized two main themes: explanations of nonvoting in terms of individual characteristics and in terms of contextual variables. These investigations have deeply enriched our understanding of electoral participation, but their limitations have also sensitized us to the remaining problems of explanation. Perusal of the work on American politics exposes a rather striking tendency in studies of participation to ignore, or soft pedal, the effects of active political mobilization. In this article we formulate two models of electoral turnout—socioeconomic and political mobilization—and apply them to aggregate data on voting in gubernatorial elections of 1978 and 1980. The socioeconomic model of turnout includes such influences as income, age, and educational attainment. To assess the effects of political mobilization, we have considered campaign spending, partisan competition, electoral margin, and the presence or absence of a simultaneous race for the United States Senate. Both of the models perform quite well individually, producing significant and meaningful coefficients and adequate fits. Yet in the final analysis we demonstrate that quite apart from major sources of variation in gubernatorial turnout—such as region and presidential versus nonpresidential years—the mobilizing influences of campaign activism and competitiveness have a strong impact on electoral participation; electoral law, i.e., closing date of registration, retains a small but significant effect on voting for governor; and socioeconomic characteristics, included in a fully specified model, have little to contribute independently to an explanation of electoral turnout. These findings are very much in the same vein as related cross-national investigations, which emphasize the crucial role of electoral law and political parties and downplay individual characteristics as determinants of electoral participation. On the basis of the research reported here, we argue that scholars need to pay more attention to political mobilization as an explanation of electoral turnout.