Too Liberal, Too Conservative, or About Right? The Implications of Ideological Dissatisfaction for Supreme Court Legitimacy
43 Pages Posted: 5 Oct 2015
Date Written: October 4, 2015
Abstract
Scholars have rediscovered the theory of institutional legitimacy, with a vengeance. This reinvigorated attention has produced some vexing controversies, none of which is more important than that of whether the Supreme Court’s legitimacy depends upon satisfying the ideological expectations of the American people. That debate has recently been enlarged by hypotheses about whether ideological dissatisfaction’s influence depends upon citizens’ beliefs about legal realism and processes of decision-making. Unfortunately, serious measurement issues cloud the literature. Here, we reconsider these questions using a nationally representative sample. We first show that ideological dissatisfaction has practically no impact on legitimacy, irrespective of how dissatisfaction is measured. We then test hypotheses from Positivity Theory, especially the hypothesized conditional effects of citizens’ beliefs about judicial decision-making, politicization, and ideological dissatisfaction on legitimacy. We conclude that the influence of ideological dissatisfaction has been overstated; greater threats to legitimacy lie in beliefs that judges are just ordinary politicians.
Keywords: Supreme Court Legitimacy, Public Opinion, Diffuse Support
JEL Classification: K40
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation