Backlash and Legitimation: Macro Political Responses to Supreme Court Decisions

Abstract

This article is a first attempt to develop and assess the competing predictions of the thermostatic model of public opinion and legitimation theory for the responses of public mood to Supreme Court decisions. While the thermostatic model predicts a negative relationship between the ideological direction of Supreme Court decisions and changes in public mood, legitimation theory predicts that changes in mood should be positively associated with the ideological content of the Court's actions. I assess these rival expectations by modeling the dynamic relationship between mood and cumulative judicial liberalism. The model estimates indicate a complex interaction between the Court and the mass public characterized by short-term backlash against Supreme Court decisions in mood followed by long-run movement toward the ideological positions taken by the Court. The results emphasize the legitimacy of the Court in American politics and point to a unique role for the Court in shaping public opinion.

Have Your Cake and Eat It Too? Cointegration and Dynamic Inference from Autoregressive Distributed Lag Models

“…For the Volscho and Kelly () replication, I find evidence of cointegration; these findings support the authors' conclusions about the long‐run effect of institutions and politics on the concentration of income of the top 1%. In the supporting information, I also replicate Ura () and find evidence of cointegration.…”

Courts and Issue Attention in Canada

“…This will enable studies of judicial influence on issue attention in other countries as well as genuinely comparative research that evaluates variance in the magnitude of courts' agenda‐setting influence as a function of institutional arrangements, media structure, political culture, and other factors. Lastly, our results suggest additional research on the role of media in linking courts to dynamics in public opinion (e.g., Marshall, ; Johnson and Martin, ; Brickman and Peterson, ; Ura, ; Manzano and Ura, ; Stoutenborough, Haider‐Markel, and Allen, ; Franklin and Kosaki, ). Finally, comparative studies of judicial politics may help identify the pathways over which judicial influence on the media passes: Are constitutional courts convenient focal points for media coverage in some political cultures, or does the structure of some judicial institutions provide some structured influence over attention to issues in national political systems?…”

“…The power to define problems, that is, the power to set the agenda, is the power to activate these latent majorities and reorient the cleavages of political conflict (Schattschneider, ). A court that can influence its country's policy agenda, then, can potentially escape the countermajoritarian difficulty by activating latent majorities in support of decisions that invalidate a law created by another majority (Ura, ; see also Ura, ).…”

Macro Implementation: Testing the Causal Paths from U.S. Macro Policy to Federal Incarceration

“…I employ three measures of macro criminal justice policy as shaped by the federal judicial, legislative, and executive branches. First, I construct a measure of cumulative, aggregate Supreme Court Policy analogous to Ura's “caselaw index” ()). I begin with a list of every Supreme Court decision from 1950 to 2009 that is related to criminal law, originated in a federal district court, and involved potential imprisonment (Spaeth et al ) .…”