Extra-judicial Actor Induced Change in Supreme Court Legitimacy

Abstract

Although public support for the U.S. Supreme Court is generally stable, various cues and heuristics affect how individuals derive political opinions. And while the Court is capable of conferring support on its own decisions, information from extra-judicial sources—such as presidential candidates—may have a potentially (de)legitimizing influence on individuals and their attitudes. Using a survey experimental design, I manipulate the source of negative statements about the judiciary to determine whether extra-judicial actors are capable of altering support for the Court and, if so, whether it is via ideological updating or is a purely affective response. I find that political actors unrelated to the Court are capable of producing change in attitudes and that those changes are affective. Those positive toward the cue source decrease their level of support upon hearing indicting statements, and vice versa, but individuals do not alter their perceived ideological distance from the Court. This finding has implications for the stability of the support on which the Court relies to expect compliance with its rulings, as well as how affective attachments to groups and their representatives influence institutional loyalty.

How Political Contestation Over Judicial Nominations Polarizes Americans’ Attitudes Toward the Supreme Court

“…For instance, Chen and Bryan (2018) study how nominees’ refusal to answer questions about their political views affects their public support, while Armaly (2018b) studies how perceptions of the Court's legitimacy were affected by messages about the political importance of filling the Supreme Court seat made vacant upon Scalia's death in 2016. In the study most related to our own, Armaly (2018a) shows that messages from political actors outside the Court can affect the public's impressions of it. Crucially, however, no study speaks to the effects of political rhetoric from actors in the adjoining branches of government – such as the praise and criticism frequently issued by presidents and the hearings held by senators throughout the nomination and confirmation process.…”

Presidential Rhetoric and U.S. Supreme Court Rulings: The Effect of Going Public on Citizen Evaluations of Institutions and Policy

“…Although scholars have examined the nature of presidents' public appeals about the Supreme Court, there remains a surprising dearth of research that details presidents' public speeches addressing Supreme Court rulings. Scholars have only begun to examine the influence of these postdecision public appeals on broader public opinion (Armaly ). We enter the debate on the effectiveness of presidential statements and propose a theory that seeks to explain how these public statements following rulings of the Court may shape individual opinion formation.…”

One Bad Apple Spoils the Bunch: Kavanaugh and Change in Institutional Support for the Supreme Court

“…Even so, the argument that diffuse and specific support are minimally related is increasingly under scrutiny by scholars who find that the outputs of the institution can directly and negatively affect the Court's diffuse support. For example, recent research highlights how subjective ideological proximity (Bartels and Johnson, 2013;Durr, Martin, and Wolbrecht, 2000;Christenson and Glick, 2019), extra-judicial elites (Armaly, 2018a), and the Court protecting unpopular minorities (Zilis, 2018) can all harm diffuse support. Similarly, a recent study by Strother and Glennon (2020) finds that the justices' own rhetoric can influence institutional support for the Court, but that the effects of such rhetoric is canceled out by performance dissatisfaction.…”