The Effect of Law on Partisan Perceptions of Judicial Legitimacy

• In Event: The Public Politics of Judicial Independence

Abstract

We evaluate the degree to which public attitudes towards the legitimacy of judicial decisions in the United States are influenced by partisanship and then whether the form that applicable law takes can attenuate the effect of partisanship. In a survey experiment, we presented respondents with a vignette in which a judge denies a hypothetical challenge to a president's exercise of authority over an executive agency. We randomly varied both the identity of the president and the degree of formality to the law the judge must apply. We find that, on average, respondents considered the judge to be more legitimate when the president was a co-partisan (Obama v. Trump) and when the law applied by the judge took the form of a formalistic bright-line rule versus a less formal standard. Notably, we also found that the effect of partisanship was significantly smaller among respondents in the formal rule-based condition compared to those assigned to the standard. The results not only highlight the extent to which the decisions of American judges are increasingly viewed by the public through a politicized lens but still more significantly they show how the role of partisanship can be attenuated depending on how legal text is crafted.

Authors

• Cary Coglianese, University of Pennsylvania

• Krin Irvine, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

• Anton Strezhnev, University of Pennsylvania