Bridging the Supreme Court & the Public: Media Credibility & Judicial Legitimacy

• In Event: Courts and Judges in the News and ‘New’ Media

Abstract

Recent scholarly work examining the stability of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy centers on how the mass public receives information. As the vast majority of Americans never directly engage with the Court, individuals typically take cues about the judiciary from like-minded elite sources. Those cues can impact the Court's legitimacy. Research on how immediate perceptions can shift as a consequence of positive or negative affirmations from these sources “suggests that there is some degree of volatility in individual attributions of legitimacy to the Supreme Court” (Armaly, 2018).

Similarly, a source’s perceived credibility plays an intervening role. This suggests that a majority of Americans will not widely alter their perceptions of the Court based on information from disingenuous actors, such as President Trump. Statements “from a source viewed as more credible among the American people… could have dire consequences for the Supreme Court's legitimacy and consequently for its role in the American constitutional system,” (Gibson and Nelson, 2019). These empirical results jointly reveal that Americans’ diffuse support for the Court can be swayed by elite actors viewed as “experts.”

Our research endeavors down a similar path to examine the role of the news media on Court support. Elite political actors---with conspicuous partisan motivations—typically have reputations with American voters. And those voters can employ motivated reasoning to prioritize information from co-partisans and discount information from out-partisans.

Still, the news media—whether or not individuals perceive an outlet to be conservative or liberal—presents itself with some degree of objectivity. As a large swath of voters remain detached from national politics—and the inattentive public may be less widely polarized compared to highly informed voters and political elites (Krupnikov & Ryan 2021)—it is possible that many Americans treat “the news” as being highly credible, no matter the source.

This has broad implications for understanding Supreme Court legitimacy. Whether news source cues are able to credibly influence the mass public's perceptions of the Supreme Court remains an open question. This research employs a survey experimental design, fielded with a convenience sample, to examine the effect of media source cues on perceptions of federal judicial nominations. We present respondents with a randomized treatment of liberal or conservative social or news media, which we expect to reveal a disparate effect for media sources that are more ideologically distant from the respondent. Still, that effect will diminish for outlets that purport to be objective news. Our results have implications for understanding the stability of the mass public's support for the Supreme Court and, in turn, the willingness of many individuals to acquiesce to judicial orders.

Author

• Lydia Applin, Bowling Green State University