Issue Preferences and Evaluations of the U.S. Supreme Court

Abstract

While some previous studies have found that public support for the Supreme Court is related to the ideological direction of its decisions, these studies were based on data from the Warren Court era, a period of high profile judicial liberalism. Since then, the Court has grown much more conservative, although its decisions have carried a much lower profile. We show that the mass media have done little to allow ordinary Americans to follow this change. As a consequence, we find that public evaluations in the 1990s continued to reflect a 1960s understanding of the Court, with liberals on racial and gender issues as well as those least fearful of crime evaluating the Court most favorably. Only those who are both knowledgeable and highly motivated to follow Court outputs tracked its rightward shift on issues that are important to them.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 59 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.