The Supreme Court and PublicOpinion: The Impact of Information on Confidence in the Court.

Existing research shows that the public knows the least about the Supreme Court, but affords the Court more favorable ratings than it does to the legislative and executive branches. We ask: Is the Supreme Court?s legitimacy, in part, a function of public uncertainty about its decisions? This paper examines the effects of increased information about the Supreme Court on public confidence in the Court. Specifically, the paper seeks to understand how, if at all, public confidence in the Court changes after individuals are presented with information and asked their opinions about multiple Court decisions on salient issues. The paper analyzes the results of a June 2003 split-ballot national telephone survey. Employing an experimental design that measures public confidence in the Court after exposing a randomly assigned group of respondents to information about six Court decisions across a range of salient issues, compared to a control group not given such information, allows us to see how political information affects public opinion toward the Court in the aggregate and across subgroups. While overall it seems, not inconsistent with prior research, that public confidence in the Court is largely unaffected by the new information, we do find noticeable differences among certain subgroups that indicate that public opinion toward the Court is more complex than has been shown thus far but in ways that are readily explicable. In particular, confidence in the Court may decline as the public acquires information on the Court’s rulings that contradict the preferences of a very large and longstanding majority of the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]