People Beneath Robes: How Identity Impacts Judicial Legitimacy

• In Event: Public Opinion, Court Legitimacy, and Support for the Rule of Law

Abstract

The font of the federal judiciary’s political authority is its public support. While many recent political science studies have examined how features of the political environment in which the judiciary operates affect specific and diffuse support, such as political polarization of the composition of the bench and patterns of decisions that are seen as overly ideological, few have considered how the characteristics of the jurists who exercise judicial authority condition support for the judicial branch and its rulings. We focus on how two important jurist characteristics—gender and race/ethnicity—inform public attitudes towards the judiciary. Drawing on work in identity politics, we argue that members of the public evaluate judicial decisions and the judiciary as an institution less favorably when jurists who are racial and ethnic minorities or women are appointed to the federal judiciary and issue decisions on cases before them. We further argue that these effects are acute among members of the public who are prejudiced towards minorities and favor traditional gender norms. We evaluate these expectations through a series of survey experiments which vary the race/ethnicity and gender of persons nominated to the bench and of the jurists who hand down rulings in the courtroom. This project has important theoretical and empirical implications for the mechanisms by which the public forms and expresses support for the federal judiciary as well as for how racial and ethnic and gender identities inform public attitudes towards governmental actors and institutions.

Authors

• Joshua Boston, Bowling Green State University

• Benjamin Kassow, University of North Dakota

• Ali Shiraz Masood, Rhodes College

• David Ryan Miller, Vanderbilt University