A Countermajoritarian Institution in the Public Mind

• In Event: Poster Session: Public Administration & Law and Courts
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Law and Courts: Issues in Judicial Politics and Judicial Behavior

Abstract

Prior scholarship has debated whether judicial legitimacy is a product of evaluations of courts’ performance or more fundamental democratic values. Yet existing work on judicial legitimacy mainly focuses on the case of the United States and rarely considers the broad institutional context in which courts operate. Focusing the role of courts as countermajoritarian institutions, we argue that citizens’ status as members of the political majority or minority moderate the impact of ideological distance to the court on judicial le gitimacy. We test our theoretical expectation to understand the judicial legitimacy of constitutional courts in the United States and Germany by analyzing both observational and experimental data based on a nationally representative sample. We show that ideological agreement with the court has a much stronger effect on legitimacy among members of the political minority, or those who are ideologically distant from the current governing coalition. We find that the perception that the court is a countermajoritarian institution constitutes a potential mechanism linking institutional distances to the court and the elected branch to the legitimacy.

Authors

• Hyeonho Hahm, University of Mannheim

• Michael Zilis, University of Kentucky