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

Abstract

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.

Reassessing the Supreme Court: How Decisions and Negativity Bias Affect Legitimacy

“…Bartels and Johnston (2013) focus on the proximity of individual subjective assessments of the Court's ideology and find strong evidence that diffuse support is a function of individual-level ideological congruence. Christenson and Glick (2015a) find that diffuse support decreases among individuals whose updated assessments of the Court's ideology move away from their own ideology after observing a decision, and that it increases among those whose assessments of the Court's ideology move toward their own. Bolstering these challenges, Sen (2015) reevaluates legitimacy theory in the judicial nominations context (see, for example, Gibson and Caldeira 2009b) and provides additional evidence that ideology rather than factors such as qualifications affect perceptions of potential justices.…”

“…Building on the findings in Bartels and Johnston (2013), partisanship may matter less than how far one perceives the Court's ideology relative to oneself-for example, two strong Republicans may react differently to the same Court if one perceives the Court to be relatively liberal and the other perceives it to be moderately conservative. In this model, new decisions provide information for people to update their perceptions of the Court and legitimacy assessments follow (Christenson and Glick 2015a). It is potentially a more forward-looking mechanism as people use individual decisions to assess whether the Court will be with them or against them in the future.…”

“…Our ideology measures differ in small but important ways from previous studies of the Court. The key difference is that we use branching questions (see also Christenson and Glick 2015a), which follow recommended practice in survey research (Aldrich et al 1982) and avoid the debate over the middle response category (see Bartels and Johnston 2013;Gibson and Nelson 2015). Also different from existing studies that use snapshot measures of ideology or proxies for it, our research design allows individuals' assessments of the Court's ideology to change, which captures the reality that they may update their views in the periods surrounding the decisions.…”

Naming Names: The Impact of Supreme Court Opinion Attribution on Citizen Assessment of Policy Outcomes

“…Notable in this literature is the conclusion that the American High Court benefits from a robust sense of legitimacy not enjoyed by other high courts (Gibson et al 1998) and that this diffuse support does not turn on affection for its decisions (Gibson and Caldeira 2009). In recent years, others have argued that assessments of legitimacy are at least in part a function of ideological agreement with the Court, with the implication being that the U.S. Supreme Court's legitimacy may not be so stable after all (Bartels and Johnston 2013;Christenson and Glick 2015; but see Gibson and Nelson 2015). Central to this debate is the question of how the public actually processes output from the Court (Johnston et al 2014).…”

Unilateral Action and Presidential Accountability

“…While an emerging literature shows that the public holds mostly negative views toward unilateral power (Christenson and Kriner 2017a;Reeves and Rogowski 2015;2016;2019a) and reacts negatively toward its use (Christenson and Kriner 2017b;Lowande and Gray 2017;Reeves and Rogowski 2018;2019b), this scholarship generally does not study whether presidential action is evaluated on the basis of issue congruence. This omission is surprising given the relatively extensive research on issue accountability in studies of legislatures (Ansolabehere and Jones 2010;Canes-Wrone, Brady, and Cogan 2002) and courts (Ansolabehere and White 2018;Bartels and Johnston 2013;Christenson and Glick 2015), the role of issues in presidential vote choice (Jessee 2009;, and the extent to which presidential evaluations are responsive to outcomes rather than issues, such as economic conditions and wartime casualties (e.g., Abramowitz, Lanoue, and Ramesh 1988;Erikson 1989;Karol and Miguel 2007;Kriner 2006;Mueller 1973). 1 We evaluate presidential issue accountability with a nationally representative sample of nearly sixty thousand Americans.…”