The literature on the U.S. Supreme Court has paid substantial attention to the perceived legitimacy of the Court’s decisions. However, much less attention has been paid to the perceived legitimacy of the reasons the Court provides for its opinions. We design two experiments to understand how the public perceives opinion content. Unlike prior studies, we take it as a given that the Court uses legal reasons in its decisions. This offers us a baseline by which to compare departures from these legal reasons. We find that extralegal reasons, when paired with legal reasons, do nothing to harm the legitimacy of the Court. Furthermore, we find that even with a lack of legal reasons, the use of extralegal reasons does not harm the legitimacy of the Court, even among those who find that these reasons are inappropriate for the Court to use.
This article studies recent trends in the composition and uses of Swedish commissions of inquiry in preparing policy for the government. For much of the 20th century, commissions with representatives of major parliamentary parties and other policy stakeholders served as an arena of negotiation and compromise between the government, the opposition parties, and organised interests. Drawing on a unique data set of 2,087 commissions appointed between 1990 and 2016, we show that their representativeness has declined significantly. We also document a significant decrease in the inclusion of politicians and an increase in the presence of civil servants. Governments have also increased their control over commissions by issuing more directives. We further document a dramatic decline of reservations and dissenting opinions in the commission reports. This may be due to a combination of including fewer potentially dissenting voices and restricting commissions' scope. We conclude that commissions are no longer the arenas of compromise‐seeking that they were for most of the 20th century.
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