Does Public Support for Judicial Power Depend on Who is in Political Power? Testing a Theory of Partisan Alignment in Africa

Abstract

Judicial power is central to democratic consolidation and the rule of law. Public support is critical for establishing and protecting it. Conventional wisdom holds that this support is rooted in apolitical factors and not dependent on who is in political power. By contrast, we argue that support may be driven by instrumental partisan motivations and therefore linked to partisan alignment with the executive. We test the argument with survey evidence from 34 African countries. To provide causal evidence, we conduct difference-in-differences analyses leveraging Ghana’s three presidential transitions since 2000. Across Africa, support for judicial power is high, while trust in courts is lower. However, presidential co-partisans are less supportive of horizontal judicial power over the president and more supportive of vertical power over the people. The article demonstrates the importance of partisan alignment with the executive in shaping support for judicial power, with implications for judicial behavior and legitimacy.

All the President's Justices? The Impact of Presidential Copartisanship on Supreme Court Job Approval

“…We now present a more formal statistical test—one that is similar to the tests in Franck and Rainer (2012) and Bartels and Kramon (2020)—of our first hypothesis using these same job approval surveys. We leverage the four transitions in the presidency that occurred from 1986 to 2019 in order to estimate the effect of presidential copartisanship on the Court's job approval, while controlling for potentially important differences between Republicans and Democrats that may affect approval among these partisan groups.…”

“…(2020) report a dynamic correlation between the president and perceived Supreme Court ideology in the aggregate, those studies do not break down the individual‐level effect of presidential copartisanship on Court approval and the associated partisan “flips” across partisan transitions in the presidency. We know of one other study, in the African context, that reports this type of effect on public support for judicial power, though the copartisanship effect operates in different ways depending on over whom (the president or the people) courts have power (Bartels and Kramon 2020).…”

Partisan Context and Procedural Values: Attitudes Towards Presidential Secrecy Before and after the 2016 US Election

“…Indeed, Christenson and Kriner (2017, 341) note that 'comparing across pre-sidents…is no easy task'. No prior studies on procedural values incorporate such real-world changes in political context, with the important exceptions of Smith and Park (2013), who survey a panel of respondents before and after the intensification of the Senate health care debate in 2009-10, and Bartels and Kramon's (2020) study of attitudes towards judicial power in Ghana, using repeated cross-sections across presidential elections.…”

Public Support for the Judicial Branches under the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The first outcome variable is the public support for the judicial branch. According to Bartels and Kramon (2020), there are two types of judicial power; horizontal power, which is judicial power over the public, and vertical power, which is judicial power over the incumbents. To measure the court's support in both horizontal and vertical dimensions, we ask the following questions.…”