The Presidency, Partisan Cues, and Public Perception of the U.S. Supreme Court

• In Event: Courts and the Media

Abstract

As compared to Congress and the Presidency, the U.S. Supreme Court generally garners high levels of public support. At the same time, the public possess very little information about the Court as compared to the other branches of government. Given this informational vacuum, how do the elected branches of government influence public perceptions of the Court? We seek to answer this question by exploring how partisan cues from the executive affect aggregate public perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court. We offer a theory on partisan motivated reasoning where the public’s perceptions of the Court are shaped by one’s partisan identity and the party identification of the executive.

Our key expectation is that partisan public’s views of the Supreme Court and the individual justices change based on the changes in the White House. Ceteris paribus, Republicans and Democrats are more likely to support the Court if the President is of the same party. Partisans are also more likely to support individual justices, regardless of ideology, if they are nominated by a President from the same party. We test these expectations by analyzing panel and cross-sectional survey data from the American National Election Studies, Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, and other studies that span periods where the Presidency changed parties, but the makeup of the Court remained the same (such as 2008 to 2009). We supplement this analysis through a series of vignette survey experiments conducted online using convenience sample recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. With this factorial design, we assess public support for a set of justices hypothetically considered for nominated to the Supreme Court, manipulating both the justices’ ideology as well as the President that has or had considered them for the Court (Obama or Trump).

The project speaks to the role of partisan identity in shaping public opinion toward both the Court and individual jurists. It holds promise for future inquiries on public opinion and Supreme Court legitimacy, and it also offers significant normative implications by helping improve our understanding of how public perceptions of key American institutions are intertwined.

Authors

• Ali Shiraz Masood, California State University, Fresno

• Ryan Strickler, University of South Carolina