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A growing body of work examines the consequences of unequal participation in American democracy for electoral outcomes. However, this scholarship has ignored the potential impact of unequal voting for the quality of dynamic representation in the American political system. Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), we examine the dynamic relationship between the policy preferences of voters and nonvoters in the American electorate. Further, we assess how unequal participation--and the incentives that it may give to policymaking elites--may moderate the relationship between the mass public and policy outcomes. Our analysis reveals that the policy preferences of voters and nonvoters respond in similar ways to the political and economic environment. In addition, we find no evidence that national policymaking elites are differentially responsive to changes in the preferences of voters and nonvoters.

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]