On the Legitimacy of National High Courts

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to examine theories of diffuse support and institutional legitimacy by testing hypotheses about the interrelationships among the salience of courts, satisfaction with court outputs, and diffuse support for national high courts. Like our predecessors, we are constrained by essentially cross-sectional data; unlike them, we analyze mass attitudes toward high courts in eighteen countries. Because our sample includes many countries with newly formed high courts, our cross-sectional data support several longitudinal inferences, using the age of the judicial institution as an independent variable. We discover that the U.S. Supreme Court is not unique in the esteem in which it is held and, like other courts, it profits from a tendency of people to credit it for pleasing decisions but not to penalize it for displeasing ones. Generally, older courts more successfully link specific and diffuse support, most likely due to satisfying successive, nonoverlapping constituencies.

Sensationalism and Sobriety Differential Media Exposure and Attitudes Toward American Courts

“…Research on public opinion toward the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently found a positive relationship between sophistication and diffuse support Casey 1974;Gibson, Caldeira, and Baird 1998;Murphy and Tanenhaus 1968;Scheb and Lyons 2000). That is, "to know the Court is to love it."…”

What Are the Political Consequences of Trust?

“…First, trust is hypothesized to increase public support for democratic regimes. At the most fundamental level, trust in political institutions is considered a source of diffuse support; some even hold that the two are synonymous (see, e.g., Braithwaite & Levi, 1998;Brehm & Rahn, 1997;Easton, 1965;Gibson et al, 1998). Trust is hypothesized to have direct effects on both the survival of the regime and its effective functioning.…”

Judicial Disagreement need not be Political: Dissent on the Estonian Supreme Court

“…Courts, and a fortiori individual judges, care about the court's perceived legitimacy. This may either be their legitimacy as perceived by society at large (Gibson et al, 1998), or by other judicial organs. Thus, judging in US state courts and federal district courts is characterised less by policy-seeking than judging in the Supreme Court, because judges lower in the hierarchy must anticipate the potential costs of their decision being reversed (Songer et al, 1994).…”