On the Ideological Foundations of Supreme Court Legitimacy in the American Public

Brandon L. Bartels and Christopher D. Johnston

American Journal of Political Science, 2013, vol. 57, issue 1, 184-199

Abstract: Conventional wisdom says that individuals’ ideological preferences do not influence Supreme Court legitimacy orientations. Most work is based on the assumption that the contemporary Court is objectively conservative in its policymaking, meaning that ideological disagreement should come from liberals and agreement from conservatives. Our nuanced look at the Court's policymaking suggests rational bases for perceiving the Court's contemporary policymaking as conservative, moderate, and even liberal. We argue that subjective ideological disagreement—incongruence between one's ideological preferences and one's perception of the Court's ideological tenor—must be accounted for when explaining legitimacy. Analysis of a national survey shows that subjective ideological disagreement exhibits a potent, deleterious impact on legitimacy. Ideology exhibits sensible connections to legitimacy depending on how people perceive the Court's ideological tenor. Results from a survey experiment support our posited mechanism. Our work has implications for the public's view of the Court as a “political” institution.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2012.00616.x

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:wly:amposc:v:57:y:2013:i:1:p:184-199

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Journal of Political Science from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().