Suchergebnisse

Evidence of procedural fairness leads individuals to support Supreme Court decisions, even ones with which they disagree. Yet, in some settings, unfair behavior is seen as acceptable, even praiseworthy, if it yields a pleasing outcome for one's group. The loyalty norm occasionally trumps the fairness norm, and group loyalty has taken on increasing importance in American politics. I use a nationally representative survey with an embedded experiment, and a convenience sample survey experiment, to relate group (i.e., partisan) loyalty and perceptions of (un)fair behavior to support for the Court. I find that when group concerns are unclear, individuals tend to punish the Court for unfair behavior. However, despite conventional wisdom regarding fairness and support, individuals fail to censure unfair behavior when their group benefits from the Court's impropriety. These effects hold when integrating preferences regarding specific case outcomes. Perceived unfair procedures do not universally harm evaluations of the Supreme Court.

ObjectivesThe objective of this article is to determine whether the institutional resources available to state legislatures impact the cases that a state's court of last resort chooses to hear. Specifically, does legislative professionalism influence the number of cases the court audits that reference an act of the legislature?MethodI use time‐series cross‐sectional analysis to examine over 10,000 cases for 44 state courts from 1998 to 2009.ResultsI find that courts of last resort in states low in legislative professionalism tend to hear a greater number of cases that reference the legislature than states higher in professionalism, even after controlling for confounders such as ideological disagreement and judicial resources.ConclusionThis suggests that state supreme courts offer themselves a disproportionate influence in public policy in states with low professionalism legislatures relative to those with lawmakers more capable of authoring litigation‐proof legislation.

Although public support for the U.S. Supreme Court is generally stable, various cues and heuristics affect how individuals derive political opinions. And while the Court is capable of conferring support on its own decisions, information from extra-judicial sources—such as presidential candidates—may have a potentially (de)legitimizing influence on individuals and their attitudes. Using a survey experimental design, I manipulate the source of negative statements about the judiciary to determine whether extra-judicial actors are capable of altering support for the Court and, if so, whether it is via ideological updating or is a purely affective response. I find that political actors unrelated to the Court are capable of producing change in attitudes and that those changes are affective. Those positive toward the cue source decrease their level of support upon hearing indicting statements, and vice versa, but individuals do not alter their perceived ideological distance from the Court. This finding has implications for the stability of the support on which the Court relies to expect compliance with its rulings, as well as how affective attachments to groups and their representatives influence institutional loyalty.

"Cross-aisle" interpersonal relationships on the Supreme Court receive significant attention from the justices and the media that covers them. When speaking to the public, justices frequently deflect questions about legal differences with each other by pointing to their ability to get along off the bench, suggesting everyone is just doing their job and there are no hard feelings when opinions go the other way. We theorize these tales of off-bench collegiality create a non-judicial avenue for public evaluation of the Court and its justices. But we also suspect that case outcomes limit these stories' influence. To test this theory, we conducted a survey experiment that exposed individuals to several stories about judicial friendships. We find that discussing friendships influences attitudes toward the Court most when such stories include a clear cue about the friendly justices' opposing ideologies. When accounting for ex ante policy preferences, however, that influence is entirely attenuated. Our results indicate these stories impact evaluations of the Court, but outcome-based evaluations prove more critical, suggesting the menu of options for the Court to bolster public support is limited in the context of case outcomes.

Supreme Court vacancies are now characterized by great partisan efforts to confirm—or impede—the nomination. Amid a politicized vacancy before the 2020 election, there was cause to question the conclusion that these vacancies do not harm the judiciary in the public's eyes. We utilize panel data collected before and after Justice Ginsburg's death to investigate the effects of the vacancy and partisan posturing to fill it. We find that the battle over the vacancy yielded decreases in diffuse support among Democrats, particularly among those who read a story about Senate Republicans' willingness to fill an election-year vacancy after refusing to in 2016. Support for federal judicial elections decreased across survey waves, but only among certain subsets of respondents. Finally, belief that one's preferred 2020 candidate would nominate the next justice significantly influenced support for curbing. Elected branch politics appear capable of influencing the mass public's level of support for the Court.

Recent work on the influence of social identities reveals that placed-based attachments serve as a powerful heuristic when making political assessments. When a politician makes a place-based appeal—such as cuing rural origins—individuals who share that identity more strongly support the candidate. Yet, other important identities—namely, partisanship—are strongly related to place. Here, we attempt to disentangle the unique influence of a place-based identity (and the strength thereof) on candidate support. Additionally, we ask whether shared place can compel supportive behavior, rather than merely increase expressive support. Using a unique survey experiment, we find that those who strongly identify with a place are more willing to donate to the campaign of a shared-place candidate, relative to weaker place identification, but only among co-partisans. We find little evidence that place attachment influences supportive behavior beyond the role of partisanship. Disparate identities—here, place and partisanship—that create cross-pressures can operate in tandem.

The last few years have witnessed an increase in democratic "backsliding" in the United States—a decline in the quality of democracy, typically accompanied by an influx of non-normative behavior, such as political violence. Despite the real consequences of support for violence, fairly little is known about such an extremist attitude outside studies of terrorism or aggression. Using a unique survey containing many psychological, political, and social characteristics, we find that perceived victimhood, authoritarianism, populism, and white identity are the most powerful predictors of support for violence, though military service, conspiratorial thinking, anxiety, and feelings of powerlessness are also related. These patterns suggest that subjective feelings about being unjustly victimized—irrespective of the truth of the matter—and the psychological baggage that accompanies such feelings lie at the heart of support for violence. We use these results to build a profile of characteristics that explain support for violence; the predictive validity of this profile is then tested by examining its relationship with support for the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, with which it is strongly associated, even accounting for support for Donald Trump. Our findings have implications for the detection of extremist attitudes and our understanding of the non-partisan/ideological foundations of anti-social political behavior.

While cognitive psychologists have learned a great deal about people's propensity for constructing and acting on false memories, the connection between false memories and politics remains understudied. If partisan bias guides the adoption of beliefs and colors one's interpretation of new events and information, so too might it prove powerful enough to fabricate memories of political circumstances. Across two studies, we first distinguish false memories from false beliefs and expressive responses; false political memories appear to be genuine and subject to partisan bias. We also examine the political and psychological correlates of false memories. Nearly a third of respondents reported remembering a fabricated or factually altered political event, with many going so far as to convey the circumstances under which they "heard about" the event. False‐memory recall is correlated with the strength of partisan attachments, interest in politics, and participation, as well as narcissism, conspiratorial thinking, and cognitive ability.

Support for the U.S. Supreme Court does not appear to be polarized on ideological or partisan lines. However, the form of polarization for which the mass political behavior field has amassed substantial support is affective in nature. We reconsider the hypothesis that polarization does not bear on Court support by examining the role of affective polarization. Using three sources of nationally representative survey data, we consistently find a negative relationship between affective polarization and both diffuse and specific support for the Court. Moreover, neither general nor Court-specific political sophistication mitigates the negative effect of affective polarization; rather, sophistication exacerbates affective polarization's influence on support. Finally, panel data show that affective polarization precedes negative evaluations of the judiciary, though there is no support for the converse relationship. Evaluations of the Court are not free from the forces of polarization but are influenced by diverging extra-judicial emotional orientations toward in- and out-groups.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court goes to great lengths to avoid the "political thicket," it is sometimes unwittingly pulled in. We employ several experimental treatments—each of which is composed of real behaviors that took place during the Trump impeachment trial—to understand the impact of the trial on attitudes about the Court. We find that Chief Justice Roberts' presence and behaviors during the trial failed to legitimize the proceeding and may have even harmed views of the Court. Treatments involving Roberts' actions decreased willingness to accept Court decisions and, in some cases, negatively impacted perceived legitimacy. We also find that criticisms of the Chief Justice by Senators decreased decision acceptance. These findings clarify both the bounds of the institution's legitimizing power and the tenuous nature of public support in times of greater Court politicization by outside actors.

AbstractRecent work on political divisions in the mass public has identified several manifestations of polarization linked to different types of attitudes, orientations, and behaviors. Of these, affective polarization and perceived polarization have attracted increasing attention, though we still know fairly little of the links between these variants of polarization. In this paper, we examine the association between affective and perceived polarization, with an aim toward disentangling any potential causal relationship between the two processes. Using two sets of nationally representative panel data from 1992 to 1996 and 2008 to 2009, we find evidence that affective polarization causes perceived polarization, and that perceived polarization is not related to future affective polarization. Stratifying the models by level of political information, we find that the strength and statistical significance of the relationships between past and future values of affective and perceived polarization are conditional on political sophistication: more sophisticated individuals exhibit stronger relationships.