Big Reputation? Public Appearances and Public Perception

• In Event: Poster Session: State Politics and Policy & Law and Courts
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Law and Courts

Abstract

Supreme Court justices are increasingly engaged with their publics. We see the justices more frequently, and hear them speak, and this may have ramifications for how we view the Court. In a wide-ranging project, we consider the extent to which the justices are engaging in public appearances, the type of appearances in which they’re engaging, what drives the justices to engage, and what the potential consequences of engagement on public approval are.



This part of the project uses a survey experiment to understand the consequences of particular sorts of public appearances on public perceptions of the justices and of the Court. We will ask respondents, in an experimental design, about their support for the Court after a hypothetical justice appearance with a particular type of speech. (To compare, we will provide a similar hypothetical centered on a Member of Congress.) We provide respondents with one of a variety of treatments – a known liberal or conservative justice speaking on Court procedure; both with a more poignant political speech; and then similar treatments using a Member of Congress as the speaker to compare with justice speakers – and then ascertain whether respondents’ stated levels of support both for the particular justice (Member of Congress) and for the Supreme Court (Congress) as an institution differ from the control. We expect that justices speaking more politically will be held in lower esteem than those who speak on Court procedure; that justices who speak on Court procedure may obtain higher support than the control; and that those speaking more politically will be far less liked than those in the control. We suspect this same pattern may not hold with respect to Members of Congress, who are expected to be politicians, though it may well be that the nonideological appearances might enhance their approval as compared with the control.

Author

• Taraleigh Davis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee