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A growing body of empirical research shows an association between public support for the US Supreme Court and both judicial independence and congressional court curbing activity. At the same time, studies of jurisdiction stripping show Congress' efforts to limit federal courts' jurisdiction are principally related to courts' workloads rather than ideological differences between courts and Congress. Here, the authors connect these streams of inquiry by testing the hypothesis of a negative relationship between public support for the Supreme Court and jurisdiction-stripping legislation. Contrary to prior studies, the authors find a positive relationship between Americans' confidence in the Supreme Court and jurisdiction stripping. This result indicates the need for additional research on the interactions among public opinion, federal courts, and Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judicial deference to elected legislatures and executives on questions of constitutionality is motivated, in part, by a belief that unelected judges should not interfere with the application of the people's political authority by their elected representatives. This view assumes that unelected judges are unrepresentative of the people and that elected officials are faithful agents of their constituents. Canonical and contemporary research in political science, though, challenge these assumptions. The "regime politics" perspective proposes judicial majorities are typically partners in a national governing coalition and that judicial decisions--even those that invalidate or narrowly interpret laws created by elected institutions--tend to advance the interests of legislative majorities and the voters who support them. More recent "popular agency" theories of judicial power claim electoral majorities may make common cause with unelected judges in ways that stymie the political goals of elected representatives. This Essay describes these two perspectives on the relationship between majoritarian politics and judicial power and describes some of their implications for the problem of judicial deference. I argue first the regime politics view of judicial power suggests normative concerns about judicial deference to the political branches of government is misplaced. Meaningful and independent judicial scrutiny of legislative and executive policy making is foreign to a system in which courts, Congress, and president are members of the same team. In contrast, I argue the popular agency view of judicial independence suggests that courts' latitude to independently interrogate policy making by the elected branches of government will vary, in part, as a function of the public's perception of their elected representatives' trustworthiness. I conclude by identifying some political factors that may support diminished judicial deference to the choices of elected legislatures and executives in some cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop and assess an account of ideological asymmetries in public support for the Supreme Court. We find that specific support for the Supreme Court is more strongly negatively related to perceptions that the Court is overly liberal than perceptions that the Court is overly conservative. Our findings provide a more complete theoretical account of dynamics in specific support for the Supreme Court and indicate a mechanism behind the recent decline in the Supreme Court's public standing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: There is substantial evidence that American voters blame or credit the president for the state of the economy when making electoral decisions. However, a variety of findings on economic voting, cognitive biases in information processing, and party polarization indicate that both objective and subjective economic information should become less important to voters as partisan polarization increases. We evaluate whether partisan polarization attenuates the link between economic performance and citizens' votes. Methods: We estimate statistical models of the incumbent party vote shares in U.S. presidential elections from 1952 to 2016 including as predictive terms national partisan polarization (DW‐NOMINATE) and the interaction between polarization and economic growth (annualized second quarter GDP change in election years). Results: We find support for our expectation that greater partisan polarization mitigates the association between economic performance and American election returns. Conclusion: Economic performance exerts less influence on vote choices when parties are highly polarized than when they are not. Also, currently high levels of partisan polarization in the United States indicate elections will remain competitive, even if economic conditions otherwise favor or undermine an incumbent candidate's chances of winning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Americans continue to express greater and more stable levels of confidence in the Supreme Court than in Congress or the executive branch of the federal government, the Supreme Court's public standing has fallen steadily over the last fifteen years. A growing body of research in political science and related fields indicates that declining public support undermines judicial independence. To illustrate these effects, we estimate a statistical model of the Supreme Court's propensity to invalidate federal laws on constitutional grounds in each term from 1973 through 2014 and generate predictions of the number of federal laws struck down by the Supreme Court under various political conditions. This analysis shows how the decline in public support during the Roberts Court year has affected the Justices' willingness to invalidate federal laws. We argue that evidence of a link between persistent declines in the Supreme Court's public standing and lost judicial independence suggest that Chief Justice Roberts take a more aggressive public stance as an advocate for the Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]