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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]

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]

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]

In this article, we draw on a prominent model of public management to develop a preliminary theoretical approach to understanding the role of the chief justice in Supreme Court decision-making. In particular, we argue that the Court may seek legitimacy through greater unanimity and discuss how the leadership of the chief justice can facilitate that effort. We assess a hypothesis derived from this theory, showing greater agreement among the justices as the incumbent chief justice's tenure in office increases. We argue that these results provide support for further attention to and development of a public administration-based approach to the study of Supreme Court decisionmaking. The application of public administration to judicial politics provides further evidence of management dynamics in American institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a first attempt to develop and assess the competing predictions of the thermostatic model of public opinion and legitimation theory for the responses of public mood to Supreme Court decisions. While the thermostatic model predicts a negative relationship between the ideological direction of Supreme Court decisions and changes in public mood, legitimation theory predicts that changes in mood should be positively associated with the ideological content of the Court's actions. I assess these rival expectations by modeling the dynamic relationship between mood and cumulative judicial liberalism. The model estimates indicate a complex interaction between the Court and the mass public characterized by short-term backlash against Supreme Court decisions in mood followed by long-run movement toward the ideological positions taken by the Court. The results emphasize the legitimacy of the Court in American politics and point to a unique role for the Court in shaping public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars often assert that public support for judicial authority induces Congress to grant resources and discretion to the Supreme Court. However, the theory of competing public agency embraced by the Constitution suggests that public support for courts cannot, by itself explain congressional support for judicial authority. Instead, the logic of the separation of powers system indicates that legislative support for the institutional capacity of courts will be a function of public confidence in the legislature as well as evaluations of the judiciary. We test this theory, finding that public confidence in both Congress and the Court significantly affect congressional support for the Supreme Court, controlling for the ideological distance between the Court and Congress as well as the Court's workload. The results offer a more refined and complex view of the role of public sentiment in balancing institutional power in American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research indicates that U.S. Supreme Court justices who are likely to control opinion assignments may withhold votes in an initial round of conference voting in circumstances that suggest that this behavior has strategic origins. Specifically, scholars have suggested that justices may pass in conference voting to gain control over the opinion assignment. This study extends this literature by developing a theory of the relationship between strategic passing in a conference vote and opinion assignment, which is assessed through a quantitative analysis of opinion assignments made by Chief Justice Burger. Specifically, we argue that justices selected to write opinions by those who have passed to strategically join a majority will be more ideologically peripheral compared to the majority coalition as a whole than justices who are assigned to write opinions following conference votes cast in order of seniority. Consistent with this theory, we find that Chief Justice Burger, indeed, made opinion assignments that diverged more strongly from the ideological composition of the Court's majority when he passed in conference compared with opinion assignments he made when he voted in order of seniority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]