Do Supreme Court Justices Care what the Public Thinks?

• In Event: Causes and Consequences of Public Support for the Supreme Court

Abstract

Whether the Supreme Court is responsive to public opinion is a fundamental question in American politics. Most research in this tradition finds that the Court responds to public opinion under some conditions. Recent scholarship has cast considerable doubt on this conventional wisdom, arguing that there is no evidence that Supreme Court merit decisions respond to public mood. However, virtually all studies in this literature have interrogated the relationship between mood and Court outputs at the term or case level. This research is important, but it ignores the potential role of threshold effects. When scholars use the share of liberal decisions (term level) or the ideological valence of a particular judgment (case level), they only capture effects around the majority threshold. To see how this could be a problem, imagine a case that before the justices consider public opinion would be decided 5-4 in a liberal direction. However, after taking the public's temperature and discovering there is broad support for the liberal position, the final vote is 8-1. In this hypothetical, public opinion would have changed the votes of a full third of the Court. But that effect did not change the case outcome. Thus looking for the effects of public opinion in case outcomes means researchers may systematically underestimate the effects of public opinion on the justices. Our paper significantly advances the scholarly debate on this important question by addressing the threshold problem.

Authors

• Ben Johnson, Penn State Law

• Logan Strother, Purdue University