Kavanaugh and the Court: Institutional Legitimacy in the #MeToo Era

• In Event: #MeToo and Responses to Sexual Harassment

Abstract

Nearly 30 years after Anita Hill’s testimony about sexual misconduct by a Supreme Court nominee, cultural shifts have propelled sexual harassment and assault into public discussion spaces and public tolerance for these behaviors has decreased. Nonetheless, in October of 2018, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, was accused of sexual assault and later confirmed to the Court. This paper uses panel data from a nationally representative probability survey administered from 2016 to 2019 to evaluate the effects of Kavanaugh’s nomination and confirmation amidst accusations of sexual misconduct on the perceived legitimacy of the Supreme Court.
This paper uses four waves of panel data from a nationally representative probability survey administered by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) from 2016 to 2019 to examine American’s evolving perceptions of the Supreme Court. Our four waves capture the perceived legitimacy of the Supreme Court in October 2016, August 2017, October 2018 (immediately after Kavanaugh’s confirmation), and June 2019. This enables us to examine opinion change over time and to examine both the short-term and longer-term impacts of Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Furthermore, this paper uses panel data to explore the ways in which age, gender, and partisanship shaped opinions of the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in the short- and longer-term. Data on the perceived legitimacy of the entire government and the perceived discrimination faced by women over the same time period further supplement these findings. Our preliminary evidence from analysis of the first three waves of the panel point to the polarizing influence of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. This study sheds light on the effects of events that may erode the legitimacy of American political institutions.

Authors

• Alexander Tolkin, University of Pennsylvania

• Diana C. Mutz, University of Pennsylvania

• Tyler Leigh, University of Pennsylvania

• Lizzie Martin, University of Pennsylvania