Naming Names: The Impact of Supreme Court Opinion Attribution on Citizen Assessment of Policy Outcomes

• Date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12401
• Published date: 01 June 2019

Naming Names: The Impact of Supreme Court

Opinion Attribution on Citizen Assessment of

Policy Outcomes

Scott S. Boddery Laura P. Moyer

Jeff Yates

The manner in which political institutions convey their policy outcomes can

have important implications for how the public views institutions’ policy deci-

sions. 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 opin-

ion author affects public agreement under certain conditions. Our findings

have important implications for how public support for institutional policy-

making operates, as well as the dynamics of how the Supreme Court man-

ages to accumulate and maintain public goodwill.

The manner in which institutions convey policy choices to the

rest of the world has long interested students of politics and public

policy and represents a core concern of governance dynamics

(e.g., Druckman 2001; Easton 1965; Estlund 2007; Mondak 1992).

In the case of the U.S. Supreme Court, the American convention

of attributing court decisions to justices in signed opinions involves

a careful balancing of important and sometimes competing con-

cerns, including judicial independence, accountability, and how the

opinions will be perceived by external political actors and the pub-

lic. Legal scholars have advanced strong opinions on whether the

U.S. Supreme Court’s approach to transmitting its case decisions is

optimal or might be better handled in another manner. Fiss (1983)

argues that the current method of individually signed majority

opinions best serves the Court’s institutional legitimacy while also

We are grateful to Jamie Druckman, Susan Haire, Andrew O’Geen, Steven Brooke,

David Buckley, Jamie Carson, Jim Gibson, and the reviewers and editors of Law & Society

Review for their helpful critiques on earlier drafts of this article.

Please direct all correspondence to Scott S. Boddery, Gettysburg College, Depart-

ment of Political Science, 300 N. Washington St., Gettysburg, PA 17325; e-mail:

sboddery@gettysburg.edu.

Law & Society Review, Volume 53, Number 2 (2019): 353–385

©2019 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved.

353

promoting justices’ accountability for their decisions. On the other

hand, some suggest that the Court’s institutional credibility and

robustness would be better served through the use of anonymous

opinions—similar to the practice employed in civil law countries

(Bozzo 2015; Markham 2006).

In this paper, we address a puzzle that persists regarding how

the U.S. High Court fosters and preserves legitimacy and support

among the public: can the manner in which the Court communi-

cates its policy decrees affect whether members of the public react

favorably to its legal decisions? Specifically, we are interested in

whether citizens’ agreement with a decision by the Court is affected

by source cues tied to the identity of the majority opinion author.

We argue that majority opinions attributed to the U.S. Supreme

Court as a whole should enjoy higher levels of agreement than

those attributed to particular justices because the Court-attributed

opinions will connote neutrality, credibility, and institutional legiti-

macy (Bartels and Mutz 2009; Gibson et al. 2014; Hoekstra 1995).

Using an experimental design with approximately 1200 respon-

dents, we find support for our primary thesis that legal decisions

attributed to the U.S. Supreme Court—as opposed to a specific

justice—enjoy higher levels of agreement. Our results also confirm

that this relationship is conditioned on citizens’ ideological identity.

In extended analyses, we find that environmental culturalinfluences

help determinewhether and how the gender of theattributed justice

has an impact on citizen agreement with U.S. Supreme Court

decisions.

For the U.S. Supreme Court, these considerations are espe-

cially significant given that the Court lacks the means possessed by

Congress or the executive to enforce and implement its judgments.

The Court is an unusually vulnerable policy-making institution that

relies on public support to maintain its policy viability and protect

it from institutional encroachment (e.g., Caldeira 1986). As Gibson

(2012, 2015) and others have noted, “legitimacy is for losers.” In

other words, a person’s assessment of the legitimacy of an institu-

tion and the legitimacy of its policy decisions quite often turns on

whether they agree with them. The U.S. Supreme Court typically

only has to draw from its “reservoir of good will” when citizens dis-

agree with its verdicts. Hence, making policy decisions in a manner

that is more palatable to a wider portion of the public, all else being

equal, goes a long way toward an institution being able to maintain

long-term diffuse support from the public (i.e., legitimacy) and

enjoy its governing benefits (2015: 82–84).

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 1 lays out the theoreti-

cal framework for understanding agreement with U.S. Supreme

Court decisions, and Section 2 describes our experimental design.

In Section 3, we discuss the results from our main models and

354 Impact of Opinion Assignment on Decision Assessments

then in Section 5 test whether our findings on justice attribution

are affected by the gender of the opinion author. In the final

section of our paper, we discuss the implications of our findings

for American politics and legal policymaking and suggest poten-

tial paths for future research on this subject.

Theoretical Framework

Agreement and Supreme Court Decisions

Because the U.S. Supreme Court is dependent on public sup-

port to maintain its legitimacy and to ensure the implementation

of its rulings, scholars have focused a great deal of their attention

on its public perception (Gibson et al. 2003; Gibson and Caldeira

1992; Scheb and Lyons 2000). Notable in this literature is the con-

clusion that the American High Court benefits from a robust sense

of legitimacy not enjoyed by other high courts (Gibson et al. 1998)

and that this diffuse support does not turn on affection for its deci-

sions (Gibson and Caldeira 2009). In recent years, others have

argued that assessments of legitimacy are at least in part a function

of ideological agreement with the Court, with the implication being

that the U.S. Supreme Court’s legitimacy may not be so stable after

all (Bartels and Johnston 2013; Christenson and Glick 2015; but

see Gibson and Nelson 2015). Central to this debate is the question

of how the public actually processes output from the Court

(Johnston et al. 2014). Given that legitimacy is most important for

those who do not agree with the Court’s decisions (Gibson 2012;

Gibson et al. 2014) and can impact implementation (Canon and

Johnson 1984), it becomes important to understand what factors

influence public agreement with the specific decisions of the Court.

While considerably less attention has been paid to studying

citizens’ agreement with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions than

citizens’ perceptions of the legitimacy of such decisions, the existing

research points to the importance of the content of Court opinions

(Baas and Thomas 1984; Mondak 1994; Zink et al. 2009), as well as

attributes of the Court (Boddery and Yates 2014; Zink et al. 2009)

and the framing of the decision by the media (Mondak 1994; Zilis

2015). One especially promising avenue for unpacking agreement

dynamics focuses on the use of source cues as heuristics in public

opinion about the U.S. Supreme Court. Because U.S. Supreme

Court rulingsare often complicated and can be difficult for a lay per-

son or even journalists (Slotnickand Segal 1994) to understand easily,

relying on heuristics can ease the cognitiveburden for those trying to

understandand evaluate the Court’sdecision in a case. Such heuristic

cue-following allows people to make quick assessments on complex

matters in order tohelp make sense of the world around them in an

Boddery, Moyer, & Yates 355