The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme Court Opinion Clarity

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12219
• Published date: 01 September 2016
• Date: 01 September 2016

The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme

Court Opinion Clarity

Ryan C. Black Ryan J. Owens

Justin Wedeking Patrick C. Wohlfarth

We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the

content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public oppo-

sition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel mea-

sure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which

we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis

of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an individual-level

sample of Supreme Court cases paired with issue-specific public opinion polls.

The empirical results from both models show that justices write clearer opin-

ions when their rulings contradict popular sentiment. These results suggest

public opinion influences the Court, and suggest that future scholarship

should analyze how public opinion influences the written content of decision

makers’ policies.

When the Supreme Court makes a decision contrary to pub-

lic opinion, justices are likely to worry the Court will lose public

support. So, what are justices to do? One option, of course, is to

move the policy content of the opinion closer to public sentiment.

Yet, we know that justices seek, among other things, ideological

goals (Epstein and Knight 1998) and would prefer to effectuate

them when feasible. Another option, then, is to seek their policy

goals while mitigating the possible loss of public support. It is on

this perspective we focus. We argue that justices, when they rule

contrary to public opinion, will vary the clarity of majority opin-

ions in an effort to maintain public support as best they can.

While the Court has a deep reservoir of diffuse support, frequent

counter-majoritarian decisions could leave it at risk (Gibson et al.

2003: 365). By writing a clear opinion when ruling against public

sentiment, justices can better inform the public why they so

Wethank Thomas Marshall for sharing his publicopinion poll data and workshop partic-

ipants at the Universityof Maryland, College Park for helpful feedback. We are responsible

for all interpretationsand errors.

Please directall correspondence to Ryan Owens, Departmentof Political Science, Univer-

sity of Wisconsin,Madison, WI 53706; e-mail: rjowens@wisc.edu

Law & Society Review, Volume 50, Number 3 (2016)

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C2016 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved.

703

decided, and thereby manage any immediate loss of support they

might suffer—or, think they might suffer (see, e.g., Nelson, N.d.).

We develop a measure of opinion clarity based on automated

textual readability scores that we validate using human raters.

Our results show public opinion strongly influences the content

of Court opinions. Importantly, we analyze both macro- and case-

level public opinion, providing broad-based support for our find-

ings. In one approach, we compile an aggregate data set that

includes Court decisions from 1952 to 2011, and execute a time

series analysis that scrutinizes opinion clarity as a function of

yearly changes in public mood. In a second approach, we rely on

issue-specific public opinion polls that directly relate to individual

Supreme Court cases (Marshall 1989, 2008). Using these micro-

level data, we analyze the content of specific majority opinions to

determine how public opinion influences Supreme Court opinion

clarity. Both empirical analyses offer considerable support for our

argument that justices write clearer opinions when they deviate

from public sentiment. What is more, our measure of opinion

clarity is one scholars who study other institutions could employ.

These findings are important for a number of reasons. First,

it is the content of the Supreme Court’s opinions that influence

society’s behavior. Actors within society look to those opinions to

determine whether they can engage in particular behaviors

(Spriggs and Hansford 2001). “[S]cholars, practitioners, lower

court judges, bureaucrats, and the public closely analyze judicial

opinions, dissecting their content in an endeavor to understand

the doctrinal development of the law” (Corley et al. 2011: 31).

People must understand the content of opinions and, as such,

scholars should understand the factors that influence those opin-

ions. Our results speak to how the Court crafts the content of

those opinions.

Second, the results address the Court as one institution in a

broader political system where justices know they do not neces-

sarily have the last word. That is, our approach shows how the

Court is tied into a larger network of actors and audiences in the

American political and legal system (Baum 2006). Rather than

focus on how justices influence others, we show how others (i.e.,

the public) can influence justices. At the same time, knowing justi-

ces intentionally alter the language of their opinions to overcome

audience-based obstacles tells us something that speaks to

broader normative debates about democratic control. Justices

appear to do what they can to overcome obstacles from public

opinion. So, while public opinion seems to influence their behav-

ior, justices appear able to circumvent the constraints of public

opinion by tailoring their messages. For those interested in

704 Public Sentiment and Opinion Clarity