Institutional hybridity and policy-motivated reasoning structure public evaluations of the Supreme Court
Shana Kushner Gadarian and
Logan Strother
PLOS ONE, 2023, vol. 18, issue 11, 1-15
Abstract:
How does the public assess the Supreme Court and its work? Using data from three surveys conducted over a span of ten years, we show that individuals’ policy preferences drive evaluations of the Court and its willingness to reform the Court. We find strong evidence that the Court’s hybrid legal-political nature enables a unique form of policy-motivated reasoning: respondents who agree with Court outputs view the Court and its work as more “legal” in nature, while those who disagree view both as more “political.” Our findings stand in contrast to longstanding views in the literature that the public views the Court as a fundamentally different sort of institution that stands largely separate from politics. The fact that policy attitudes powerfully inform the public’s assessment of the Court has crucial implications for the ongoing debates over Supreme Court power.
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0294525 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 94525&type=printable (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0294525
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0294525
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().