Partisans in Robes: Party Cues and Public Acceptance of Supreme Court Decisions

Abstract

The public perceives the Supreme Court to be a legal institution. This perception enables the Court's legitimacy-conferring function, which serves to increase public acceptance of its decisions. Yet, the public acknowledges a political aspect to the Court as well. To evaluate how the public responds to the different images of the Supreme Court, we investigate whether and how depictions of specifically partisan (e.g., Republican) Court rulings shape public acceptance of its decisions while varying institutional, legal, and issue characteristics. Using survey experiments, we find that party cues and partisanship, more so than the imprimatur of the Court, affect public acceptance. We also find that polarization diminishes the effect of party cues. Attributing a decision to the Court does little to increase baseline acceptance or attenuate partisan cue effects. The Court's uniqueness, at least in terms of its legitimacy-conferring function, is perhaps overstated.

Losing, but Accepting: Legitimacy, Positivity Theory, and the Symbols of Judicial Authority

“…Cross-national research indicates that legitimacy is not always sufficient to produce acquiescence, especially in relatively young courts (e.g., Gibson and Caldeira 2003), but research in the United States has generally supported the hypothesis that legitimacy can induce acquiescence (see Spence 2003a, 2005). The decisions of legitimate institutions, even when handing down unpopular decisions, seem to carry with them an obligation to accept and obey (Levi, Sacks, and Tyler 2009;Tyler 1990Tyler , 2006; but see Nicholson and Hansford 2014).…”

Naming Names: The Impact of Supreme Court Opinion Attribution on Citizen Assessment of Policy Outcomes

“…Such heuristic cue‐following allows people to make quick assessments on complex matters in order to help make sense of the world around them in an efficient and largely effective manner (e.g., Kahneman ; Nicholson and Hansford ; Salamone ). In experimental settings, researchers have found that the public is responsive to partisan source cues about the Court (Clark and Kastellec ; Nicholson and Hansford ) and that the ideology of the opinion author in particular serves as a source cue that conditions individual agreement with court decisions—even those that run counter to an individual's expressed policy preferences (Boddery and Yates ). In the section that follows, we build on these insights to lay out an account that describes how the attribution of a U.S. Supreme Court decision on a case affects the public's feelings about that decision.…”

“…On the other hand, Nicholson and Hansford () cast doubt on this view, as they find minimal evidence that attributing a decision as coming from the U.S. Supreme Court changes how heavily the public relies on partisan cues in its evaluations of a decision. While attributing the outcome of a case to the Court increased public acceptance of the decision in certain instances, the effect was quite small.…”

Motivating Cooperation and Compliance with Authority

“…Initiated largely by Bartels and Johnston ( 2013 ), and joined more recently by Christenson and Glick ( in press ) (and, to a lesser and somewhat different degree, Nicholson & Hansford, 2014 ), this view posits a far stronger relationship between specifi c and diffuse supports than heretofore imagined. 8 For example, Bartels and Johnston claim to have discovered a strong effect of disappointment in a decision of the Court, with those learning that the Court had ruled against their position on the issue of whether the government can monitor the internet expressing less institutional support than those who were told the Court had ruled in favor of the respondents' position.…”

“…It should not be surprising, therefore, that these symbols infl uence how people perceive and evaluate courts. As Nicholson and Hansford ( 2014 ) observe: "Since the Court dresses itself in legal symbols, both literally (i.e., the wearing of black robes by the justices) and fi guratively (by emphasizing reliance on the Constitution, precedent, and legal norms), its image is decidedly positive relative to the elected branches of government" (p. 2). suggest that judicial symbols can play an important role in conditioning the relationship between the two forms of support.…”