Search

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]