Updating Supreme Court Legitimacy: Testing the “Rule, Learn, Update” Model of Political Communication

• Author: Miguel M. Pereira,James L. Gibson,Jeffrey Ziegler
• Date: 01 November 2017
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X17702353
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X17702353

American Politics Research

2017, Vol. 45(6) 980 –1002

© The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X17702353

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Article

Updating Supreme Court

Legitimacy: Testing the

“Rule, Learn, Update”

Model of Political

Communication

James L. Gibson1,2, Miguel M. Pereira1,

and Jeffrey Ziegler1

Abstract

One of the more important innovations in the study of how citizens assess

the U.S. Supreme Court is the ideological updating model, which assumes

that citizens grant legitimacy to the institution according to the perceived

distance between themselves and the Court on a unidimensional ideological

(liberal–conservative) continuum. Under this model, citizens are also said

to update this calculation with every new salient Supreme Court decision.

The model’s requirements, however, do not seem to square with the long-

established view that Americans are largely innocent of ideology. Here,

we conduct an audit of the model’s mechanisms using a series of empirical

tests applied to a nationally representative sample. Our general conclusion

is that the ideological updating model, especially when supplemented with

the requirement that citizens must become aware of Court decisions,

simply does not square with the realities of American politics. Students of

Supreme Court legitimacy may therefore want to search for other theories

of legitimacy updating.

1Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA

2Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Corresponding Author:

James L. Gibson, Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus

Box 1063, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899, USA.

Email: jgibson@wustl.edu

702353APRXXX10.1177/1532673X17702353American Politics ResearchGibson et al.

research-article2017

Gibson et al. 981

Keywords

judicial legitimacy, public opinion, U.S. Supreme Court, ideology

How do citizens update their views of the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme

Court? This question has of late become interesting to legal scholars and

social scientists, as researchers have expanded their focus on accounting for

cross-sectional variability in legitimacy to address the question of legitima-

cy’s dynamics. This interest also reflects a concern for understanding how

blockbuster decisions by the Court affect the public’s view of the institution.

The implicit model of political communication used in much of this

research is quite simple. The updating process begins with the Supreme Court

making a decision. Citizens learn about the decision via the mass media and

perhaps via elites and interest groups as well. In turn, they compare their

understanding of the ruling with their own preferences on the public policy

issue at stake in the litigation. Then, they update their views of the legitimacy

of the Court as an institution. In this sense, assessments of the performance of

the institution (specific support) are thought to influence willingness to grant

legitimacy to the institution (diffuse support). The implication of this model

is that citizen support for the Court is frequently changing, as people learn

about new rulings by the justices.

At the same time, there can be little debate over the proposition that most

Supreme Court decisions have no effect on the Court’s legitimacy because

the mass public never learns that the Court has ruled. Much of the Court’s

work is conducted outside the glare of public opinion. To most people, most

Supreme Court rulings pass by unnoticed.

Blockbuster cases may be an exception. Indeed, several notable papers

have directed their attention to the Court’s decision on the Affordable Care

Act (ACA), under the assumption that the ruling on the Act was salient and

important to the American people, and therefore that the litigation can serve

as a “limiting case” for purposes of theory testing.1 These studies are signifi-

cant, in part because they conclude that the Court’s ruling on this case affected

its institutional legitimacy.

Scholars have recently considerably complicated this simple understand-

ing with what is termed the ideological updating model. For example, rather

than focusing on simple policy agreement and disagreement, both Bartels and

Johnston (2013) and Christenson and Glick (2015) introduce “ideological

satisfaction/dissatisfaction” as the main driver of change in institutional sup-

port (see also Jessee & Malhotra, 2013; Johnston, Hillygus, & Bartels, 2014;

Malhotra & Jessee, 2014). Referring to the Court’s decision on the ACA,

Christenson and Glick (2015) conclude that “the decision provides new