Public Approval of the Supreme Court and Its Implications for Legitimacy

• Published date: 01 September 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129241243040
• Author: Joshua Boston,Christopher N. Krewson
• Date: 01 September 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(3) 835–850

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129241243040

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Public Approval of the Supreme Court and

Its Implications for Legitimacy

Joshua Boston

1

and Christopher N. Krewson

2



Abstract

In examining public evaluations of governing institutions, are job approval and legitimacy relate d? This question has

dominated scholarship on Supreme Court legitimacy for decades. Conventional wisdom suggests that specif‌ic support

(e.g., job approval) and diffuse support (e.g., legitimacy) are independent. Specif‌ic support captures short-term ori-

entations based on policy alignment with the Court. Legitimacy is a long-term perspective ref‌lecting more fundamental

support for the Court as a governing institution. We challenge the paradigm that job approval and legitimacy are largely

unrelated concepts. Specif‌ically, we employ a variety of statistical techniques and panel data to show that changes in

legitimacy are a direct effect of changes in public approval. Salient decisions and Court vacancies directly shape approval

and indirectly shape legitimacy through their effects on approval. Longitudinal analysis conf‌irms tha t changes in job

approval precede and predict changes in legitimacy. These results suggest that the Court needs public approval, and its

public approval is rooted in outcome-oriented perceptions of its decisions and membership. Furthe r, sustained low levels

of approval will eventually erode legitimacy and limit the Court’sinf‌luence over policy. Thus, like the outwardly political

executive and legislative branches, it is important for the Court to build political capital through job approval.

Keywords

supreme court, legitimacy, approval

Nearly 2 years after Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s polar-

izing U.S. Senate conf‌irmation hearings, the Supreme

Court achieved an exceptional level of public approval;

in July 2020, 58% of Gallup respondents approved of

how the Court was handling its job—the highest ap-

proval rating in over a decade. By September 2021,

approval bottomed out to 40 percent—the lowest

recorded by Gallup since tracking began in 2000.

Disapproval was also at an all-time high, hitting 53%

(Gallup, 2023). In the interim, Justice Ruth Bader

Ginsburg died, Justice Amy Coney Barrett was con-

f‌irmed just before the 2020 presidential election, and

the Court’s summer 2021 non-merits “shadow”docket

decisions received ample media attention (Marcus,

2021). In turn, the Court mobilized to defend its rep-

utation; several justices made defensive statements

during September 2021 public engagements (CBS

News, 2023), and Chief Justice Roberts used his

year-end report to write, “public trust is essential, not

incidental, to our function”(Roberts, 2021).

How concerned should the Court be about sagging

public approval ratings? If scholarship had anything to

say, the answer would be “not much.”For decades,

scholarship has largely ignored things like public approval

and other measures of “specif‌ic support.”These short-

term indicators of Court support were of negligible im-

portance to the Court as an unelected institution. Rather,

the Court’s ability to exercise and maintain power is a

function of the public’s acceptance of the Court’s insti-

tutional role (i.e., “diffuse support”or legitimacy). Af-

fective orientations toward the Court’s decisions and

membership—though important—are distinct from the

public’s willingness to support institutional protections for

the Court. As such—the argument goes—specif‌ic support

and diffuse support are weakly related at most.

In this study, we leverage panel data to answer the

classic question in judicial politics regarding specif‌ic and

1

Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA

2

Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

Corresponding Author:

Christopher N. Krewson, Department of Political Science, Brigham

Young University, 745 KMBL Brigham Young University, 701 E

University PKWY Provo, UT 84602-2401, USA.

Email: chris_krewson@byu.edu

diffuse support: do changes in public approval explain

changes in the Court’s legitimacy? We utilize data from

The American Panel Survey (TAPS), which provides

approximately 1700 respondents answering regular panel

waves from 2011 to 2018, capturing 69 monthly Court job

approval ratings and 16 legitimacy evaluations.

1

We

supplement the TAPS data with information on salient

Court decisions and indicators of appointment politics.

Relying on regression, mediation, and time series ana-

lyses, we demonstrate that Court decisions and appoint-

ment politics shape public approval, which then shapes

the institution’s legitimacy.

These novel f‌indings reveal important truths about the

relationship between the Court and the public: the Court

needs public approval for legitimacy, and its public ap-

proval is rooted in outcome-oriented perceptions of its

decisions and membership. The results suggest that

sustained low levels of approval will eventually erode

legitimacy and limit the Court’sinf‌luence over policy. In

this way, the Court appears no different than the outwardly

political executive and legislative branches; job approval

is an imperative for political capital.

Job Approval and Elected Institutions

Even without voting, the American public frequently

evaluates government actors. Surveys and polls allow

individuals to express their “satisfaction with the per-

formance of a political institution”(Caldeira and Gibson,

1992, 1126). Approval is an important concept for un-

derstanding the accountability of institutions and off‌ice-

holders to the public (Ferejohn, 1986). Polling organizations

have regularly surveyed current presidential approval since

the 1930s, with scholarly investigations taking root in the

1970s (e.g., Edwards, 1976;Kernell, 1977). Whereas

elections allow political elites to gain or retain power, job

approval cultivates political capital, which has broad and

important conceptual implications beyond particularized

support for a policy.

Most literature examining public evaluations of U.S.

institutions focuses on the presidency, where job approval

ratings are based on perceptions of the economy and

major recent events (Gronke and Newman, 2003;

Newport and Saad, 2021).

2

Events and the economy are

f‌irst interpreted by elites and then transmitted to the mass

public (Brody, 1991). In particular, salient events often

relate to wars or scandals (Newman and Forcehimes,

2010). How the public receives and accepts these sig-

nals is inf‌luenced by individual characteristics like

ideology (Ang et al., 2022).

Public evaluations of institutions can be retrospective

(Healy and Malhotra, 2013) or prospective (MacKuen,

Erikson, and Stimson, 1996). Retrospective evaluations of

the economy are crucial to understanding presidential

approval (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000;Sances, 2021).

However, recent election cycles provide strong evidence that

people evaluate economic dimensions prospectively (e.g.,

Michelitch et al., 2012), with market and consumer evaluations

shifting almost instantly after elections––before transitions in

power (Gerber and Huber, 2010). In this way, retrospective

and prospective considerations shape public support for an

institution as a function of individuals’policy leanings (Kriner

and Schwartz, 2009;Michelitch et al., 2012).

3

These dynamics inform our understanding of the

factors that shape public approval of the Supreme Court.

After all, people view the Court as a national policymaker

whose decisions are based in part on ideological con-

siderations (Gibson and Caldeira, 2011). If public eval-

uations of the Court are substantially policy-based

(Bartels and Johnston, 2020), then we should expect the

public to employ similar strategies to evaluate the Court as

the president. Scholarship on the Court suggests that

decisions and conf‌irmations are of greatest consequence

to evaluations of the Court (Epstein and Segal, 2000;

Collins and Ringhand, 2013). Just as salient policies and

major recent events are f‌iltered through ideological lenses

to shape presidential and congressional job approval, we

expect public evaluations of the Court to conditionally

respond to policy-based perceptions of (1) recent salient

decisions and (2) expected changes in policy due to new

membership.

Court Approval and Court Legitimacy

Because the Constitution largely insulates the federal

judiciary from democratic controls, Article III judges have

a distinctive relationship with American voters. Scholars

have primarily studied the judiciary’s relationship with the

public in terms of legitimacy (e.g., Caldeira and Gibson,

1992;Gibson and Caldeira, 2009). While federal judges

are not formally required to consider public sentiment,

they are nevertheless concerned with maintaining diffuse

support for two reasons. First, legitimacy is a source of

power for engendering compliance with Court decisions

even if policies are displeasing to wide swaths of the

American public (Gibson, Caldeira, and Spence, 2005;

Ura, 2014). Second, public satisfaction can help courts

avoid the ire of the elected branches. Otherwise, legis-

lative court-curbing efforts may impact judicial legitimacy

and—in turn—compliance with court rulings (Clark,

2009).

Recent scholarship has shifted attention toward Su-

preme Court job approval—an important form of specif‌ic

support. Ansolabehere and White (2020) provide evi-

dence that respondents’case-based agreement with Court

decisions leads to increases in job approval. Haglin et al.

(2021) suggest that perceptions of the Court’s ideological

bias have an asymmetric impact on job approval;

836 Political Research Quarterly 77(3)