Politicized Nominations and Public Attitudes toward the Supreme Court in the Polarization Era

Armaly, Miles T.

doi:10.1080/0098261x.2017.1370403

Cited by 20 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Likewise, the Court is now portrayed more like the elected branches (Solberg and Waltenburg 2014). As Armaly (2018b) notes, overt politicking vis-à-vis the judiciary is the “new normal.” This type of rhetoric can cue an individual as to which justices do, or do not, align with her identity, and to think of the Court in partisan terms. Comments like Justice Ginsburg calling Donald Trump “a faker,” for instance, can make clear to a conservative/Republican that Ginsburg is more favorably disposed to liberal/Democratic politics, even without knowing anything about her decisions on the bench.…”

Section: Procedural Fairness and Group Loyaltymentioning

confidence: 99%

Loyalty over Fairness: Acceptance of Unfair Supreme Court Procedures

Armaly

2020

Political Research Quarterly

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Evidence of procedural fairness leads individuals to support Supreme Court decisions, even ones with which they disagree. Yet, in some settings, unfair behavior is seen as acceptable, even praiseworthy, if it yields a pleasing outcome for one’s group. The loyalty norm occasionally trumps the fairness norm, and group loyalty has taken on increasing importance in American politics. I use a nationally representative survey with an embedded experiment, and a convenience sample survey experiment, to relate group (i.e., partisan) loyalty and perceptions of (un)fair behavior to support for the Court. I find that when group concerns are unclear, individuals tend to punish the Court for unfair behavior. However, despite conventional wisdom regarding fairness and support, individuals fail to censure unfair behavior when their group benefits from the Court’s impropriety. These effects hold when integrating preferences regarding specific case outcomes. Perceived unfair procedures do not universally harm evaluations of the Supreme Court.

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Section: Procedural Fairness and Group Loyaltymentioning

confidence: 99%

Loyalty over Fairness: Acceptance of Unfair Supreme Court Procedures

Armaly

2020

Political Research Quarterly

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“…Several recent studies evaluate related aspects, however. 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.…”

Section: Political Contestation and Public Opinion Toward The Judiciarymentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Rogowski

Stone

2019

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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Contemporary US Supreme Court nominations are unavoidably and inevitably political. Although observers worry that political contestation over nominations undermines support for qualified nominees and threatens the Court's legitimacy, there is little empirical evidence to support these claims. The authors argue that political contestation over judicial nominations provides cues that shape the public's impressions about nominees and the Court and polarizes public opinion across partisan lines. Data from a conjoint experiment administered in the first days of the Trump presidency support this argument. Political rhetoric attributed to President Trump and Senate Democrats substantially polarized partisans’ views of nominees and evaluations of the Court's legitimacy, with Republicans (Democrats) expressing significantly more (less) favorable attitudes. Additional analyses suggest that contestation generates divergent partisan responses by affecting views about the nominee's impartiality. These findings challenge existing perspectives that depict attitudes toward the judiciary as resistant to partisan considerations and have important implications for the Court's legitimacy in a polarized era.

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“…Most often, individuals engage with the judiciary in the presence of symbols—like robes, the dais on which the justices sit, and even legal precedent in which their decisions are couched—that remind them the Court is (at least officially) apolitical (Gibson et al, 2014). Importantly, these symbols bolster support even in the face of politicization of the Supreme Court during a nomination (Armaly, 2018b). These evaluations of the Court as legal, apolitical, and principled are important during vacancies.…”

Section: Winners Losers and Public Support For The Judiciarymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite the open politicking to fill Justice Scalia’s seat, institutional legitimacy seemed to remain resolute. In fact, the changes to legitimacy appear to have been increases in positive evaluations of the Court, largely because legitimizing symbols of the judiciary appear to protect it from external politicization (Armaly, 2018b). While the Supreme Court emerged from the Garland–Gorsuch situation unblemished, extreme politicization of the judiciary was not isolated to the Scalia vacancy.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…While, as a function of using a convenience sample, we cannot generalize our findings to the public writ large, the panel nature of our data do allow us to more accurately consider what aspects of future Court vacancies (and the political maneuvering used to fill them) will prove influential at the individual level (Clifford et al, 2021). Indeed, very few studies have utilized a two-wave panel design to examine how these important political events alter individual’s views of the Court (though see Armaly, 2018b; Gibson and Caldeira, 2009b), especially during times of heightened polarization. Thus, we argue that any data that can be brought to bear on such questions is helpful, especially when describing causal mechanisms.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Politicized Battles: How Vacancies and Partisanship Influence Support for the Supreme Court

Armaly

Lane

2022

American Politics Research

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Supreme Court vacancies are now characterized by great partisan efforts to confirm—or impede—the nomination. Amid a politicized vacancy before the 2020 election, there was cause to question the conclusion that these vacancies do not harm the judiciary in the public’s eyes. We utilize panel data collected before and after Justice Ginsburg’s death to investigate the effects of the vacancy and partisan posturing to fill it. We find that the battle over the vacancy yielded decreases in diffuse support among Democrats, particularly among those who read a story about Senate Republicans’ willingness to fill an election-year vacancy after refusing to in 2016. Support for federal judicial elections decreased across survey waves, but only among certain subsets of respondents. Finally, belief that one’s preferred 2020 candidate would nominate the next justice significantly influenced support for curbing. Elected branch politics appear capable of influencing the mass public’s level of support for the Court.

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Politicized Nominations and Public Attitudes toward the Supreme Court in the Polarization Era

Cited by 20 publications

References 18 publications

Loyalty over Fairness: Acceptance of Unfair Supreme Court Procedures

Loyalty over Fairness: Acceptance of Unfair Supreme Court Procedures

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

Politicized Battles: How Vacancies and Partisanship Influence Support for the Supreme Court

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