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Public Perceptions of State Court Impartiality and Court Legitimacy in an Era of Partisan Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Corey Barwick  and
Ryan Dawkins Open the ORCID record for Ryan Dawkins [Opens in a new window]
Corey Barwick
Affiliation:
Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN, USA
Ryan Dawkins*
Affiliation:
Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA, USA
*
Ryan Dawkins, Department of Political Science, U.S. Air Force Academy, Fairchild Hall, 2345 Fairchild Drive, Colorado Springs, CO, 80840, USA. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Why do some people evaluate state supreme courts as more legitimate than others? Conventional academic wisdom suggests that people evaluate courts in nonpartisan ways, and that people make a distinction between how they evaluate individual court decisions and how they evaluate the court's legitimacy more broadly. We challenge this idea by arguing that people's partisan identities have a strong influence on how people evaluate the impartiality of courts, just as they do other aspects of the political world. Using original survey experiments, validated by existing observational survey data, we show that people perceive state supreme courts as being more impartial when courts issue decisions that match the ideological preferences of their preferred political party, while court decisions at odds with their party's policy goals diminish people's belief that courts are impartial arbiters of the law. We also show that the effects of citizen perceptions of impartiality erode evaluations of state court legitimacy, which makes them want to limit the independence of judicial institutions.

Keywords

political psychologyjudicial behaviorjudicial politicsideologypublic opinioncourt legitimacypolarizationrule of law
Type
Research Article
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 54 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019

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