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Background: Courts are unusually vulnerable governing institutions that rely upon deeply seated public support and notions of institutional legitimacy to flourish and remain policy‐relevant. This diffuse support allows courts to be viable policy entities while simultaneously issuing edicts that are counter‐majoritarian. A recent debate centers on whether policy disagreement affects members of the public's diffuse support stores for the nation's High Court. Objective: Here, we investigate whether policy disagreement between citizens and their state courts influences public perceptions of state court legitimacy (diffuse support). We also examine how those who disagree with state court policy making (policy "losers") assay the legitimacy of their state courts differently than those who feel that their policy preferences are promoted by state courts (policy "winners"). Methods: We draw data from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), where researcher‐specific content for 1000 respondents allowed us to ask a number of questions about citizens' perspectives on their state high courts. We employ Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to analyze these citizen views of state legal institutions. Results: We find that policy agreement is quite relevant to citizens' levels of diffuse support for their state courts and that the relative drivers of policy "winners" and "losers" assessments of their courts' legitimacy do evince overlap but in important ways are distinct. Conclusion: Our findings provide important insight on how citizens view courts and the law. Our investigation also sheds light on the dynamics of citizen disagreement with government outcomes and perceptions of institutional legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manner in which political institutions convey their policy outcomes can have important implications for how the public views institutions' policy decisions. This paper explores whether the way in which the U.S. Supreme Court communicates its policy decrees affects how favorably members of the public assess its decisions. Specifically, we investigate whether attributing a decision to the nation's High Court or to an individual justice influences the public's agreement with the Court's rulings. Using an experimental design, we find that when a Supreme Court outcome is ascribed to the institution as a whole, rather than to a particular justice, people are more apt to agree with the policy decision. We also find that identifying the gender of the opinion author affects public agreement under certain conditions. Our findings have important implications for how public support for institutional policymaking operates, as well as the dynamics of how the Supreme Court manages to accumulate and maintain public goodwill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the identity of a majority opinion writer affect the level of agreement a Supreme Court decision receives from the public? Using a survey experiment, we manipulate majority opinion authors to investigate whether individuals are willing to agree with Supreme Court opinions authored by ideologically similar justices even though the decisions cut against their self-identified ideological policy preferences. Our study provides insight into the extent to which policy cues—represented by a political institution’s policy messenger—affect agreement with a given policy. We find that a messenger effect indeed augments the level of agreement a given Supreme Court case receives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In assessing how social forces may shape U.S. Supreme Court Justices' decision-making it has been presumed that there is a singular public opinion and that this opinion affects each individual Justice in largely the same fashion. We suggest that it is more likely the case that Justices' world views are informed and shaped by a myriad of social concerns and group identities upon which the Justices structure and process their experiences and develop and refine their personal schemas. While some have already begun to question the proposition of a monolithic public opinion influence on judicial behavior and have begun to think carefully about what we term the "micro-publics" that may inform Supreme Court Justices' decision-making, the more tangible questions of whether Justices respond to publics that are distinguishable from broad-based national public opinion and what those micro-publics might be remain largely unanswered. Our study focuses on the potential influence of localized and personal micro-publics and the possibility of partisan-based elite influence on judicial behavior. We test our hypotheses by analyzing the voting record of Supreme Court justices on civil liberties cases from 1977 to 2003 and find encouraging initial support for our theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the president's main leadership tools for influencing the direction of U.S. legal policy is public rhetoric. Numerous studies have examined the president's use of the “bully pulpit” to lead policy by influencing Congress or public opinion, or by changing the behavior of public agencies. We argue that the president can use rhetoric to change the behavior of public agencies and that this can have important social consequences. We focus on the disproportionate impact of presidential rhetoric on different “target populations” in the context of the War on Drugs. Specifically, we observe that presidential rhetoric had a greater impact on state arrest rates for African Americans than for whites, even when controlling for alternative explanations. These findings suggest that presidential rhetoric is filtered through social constructions of public policy problems when public officials act on them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the United States Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, the public's support for the judicial system looms as an especially important concern. Although studies have confirmed that the Supreme Court's reservoir of public goodwill has remained largely intact following the politically divisive decision, the status of public support for other American courts has received little attention. This reflects a broader trend in judicial politics scholarship toward placing inordinate attention on explaining public support for the U.S. Supreme Court while largely ignoring the courts where most of the policymaking in the nation occurs—state courts. We use a national survey to assess the factors influencing diffuse support for state courts. We find that although many considerations affecting diffuse support for state courts parallel the determinants of such support for the nation's high Court, important differences exist between explanations of citizen support for state courts and the Supreme Court. Most notably, judicial elections and concerns over judicial campaign contributions work to undermine citizens' support for their state courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]