This paper introduces a new perspective into the literature on judicial legitimacy by examining the incentives for courts to cater to a popular majority and offering a novel model of legitimacy that has consequences for judicial responsiveness. The account integrates into the literature classic research on how strategic social groups shape public opinion. I theorize that citizens use their perceptions of the judiciary’s support for various social groups as a means to assess the institution overall. From this insight, I derive specific expectations about the conditions under which the Supreme Court’s protection of minority groups like gays and immigrants can damage its legitimacy. Using national survey data, I demonstrate that dislike for the beneficiaries of recent Court rulings systematically diminishes the institution’s legitimacy. The influence of these group-based considerations shapes individual-level attitude change and can be observed at various points in time.
The separation-of-powers literature focuses on how the preferences of one branch constrain the behavior of its counterparts. Yet, in much of this work, scholars do not address how responsive behavior varies across particular members. Focusing on Court curbing legislation in Congress, we develop a model of heterogeneous responsiveness. Our theory identifies two distinct mechanisms that underpin responsiveness in judicial behavior, implying that the chief justice and the most moderate (swing) justice are more likely than their colleagues to adjust their behavior in response to external threats from Congress. We find that these two justices are significantly less likely to vote to invalidate legislation than their colleagues during periods of heightened Court curbing and provide evidence that distinct mechanisms shape their behaviors. In addition, we offer justice-specific evidence using a pre–post promotion analysis, demonstrating that Justice Rehnquist became responsive to Court curbing only after becoming chief justice. Our model highlights the micro-level underpinnings of judicial responsiveness to inter-institutional politics and, most broadly, speaks to the need for separation-of-powers models to differentiate the preferences of individual political actors when seeking to understand inter-institutional responsiveness.
Perceptions of procedural fairness influence the legitimacy of the law and because procedures are mutable, reforming them can buttress support for the rule of law. Yet legal authorities have recently faced a distinct challenge: accusations of impropriety based on their ascriptive characteristics (e.g., gender, ethnicity). We study the effect of these traits in the context of the U.S. legal system, focusing on the conditions under which citizens perceive female and minority judges as exhibiting impropriety and how this compares with perceptions of their white and male counterparts. We find that Americans use a judge's race and gender to make inferences about which groups the judge favors, whether she is inherently biased, and whether she should recuse. Notably, we find drastically different evaluations of female and Hispanic judges among the political right and left.
We propose a multilevel account of legislative Court curbing in order to assess existing explanations as to why such proposals come about. We argue that although Court curbing is commonly seen as the result of institutional conflict between Congress and the Supreme Court, it is best understood as a product of three interrelated factors: the individual motivations on the part of lawmakers, the partisan context in which they operate, and institutional disagreements between Court and legislature. We find evidence that micro‐level factors offer an important insight into Court curbing that institution‐focused explanations alone cannot.
How do citizens form perceptions about the ideological priorities of insulated institutions? Currently, there is little consensus on how or even whether citizens form such views. Focusing on the Supreme Court, I argue that perceptions of institutional ideology are influenced by an inter-institutional heuristic, or the popular perception that the president directly and indirectly influences the Court’s ideological direction. Using a multiple method approach, I demonstrate that citizens perceive the Court’s preferences to coincide with the president’s, changing predictably in the aggregate and varying substantially at the micro-level. The findings speak to debates about polarization in politics, showing that citizens may perceive insulated institutions as ideologically extreme due to factors beyond their control.
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