Public Opinion of New Justices Affects Views on Entire Supreme Court

A new study finds that the extent to which U.S. adults support newly appointed justices to the Supreme Court strongly influences the extent to which they support the high court as an institution.

“Prior to this study, nobody had really investigated the extent to which the way people view the high court is influenced by the way they feel about new justices,” says Elizabeth Lane, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of political science at North Carolina State University. “That’s what we wanted to explore with this work. And given the current focus on how the public views the Supreme Court, it seems especially timely.”

For the study, researchers conducted an in-depth survey of 1,223 Black and white U.S. adults.

Study participants were asked a series of demographic questions, including race, age, income and political affiliation. Participants were then asked to review the demographic background of four fictional Supreme Court nominees, including the nominee’s race, religion, ideology and the political party of the nominating president.

Participants were then asked to answer questions about whether they would support the nominee; whether they thought the nominee would be impartial; and how qualified they thought the nominee was for the Supreme Court. Study participants were also asked questions about how they would view the Supreme Court if the nominee were confirmed; the extent to which the nominee’s confirmation would affect their view of the court “as a legal institution”; and whether they thought the Supreme Court would be more likely to “make decisions that I agree with.”

“One big takeaway is that supporting a nominee because of shared racial identity is one of the dominant predictors of support for the court in the context of nominations,” Lane says. “Black respondents view Black nominees more favorably, and as a result, view the court more favorably should that nominee be confirmed. This effect is particularly strong for Black Democrats.

“The Supreme Court doesn’t garner much attention unless it is issuing big opinions or a vacancy on the court needs to be filled,” Lane says. “And public opinion is important to the court, because it relies on public support to put pressure on the president and Congress to take action that reflects the will of the court.

“This study sheds light on one of the factors that influences public opinion of the court, and which nobody had demonstrated before. One of the key findings is that providing representation for Black Americans – who have historically been marginalized – really benefits the institution, without meaningfully decreasing support among white respondents.”

The paper, “The Influence of Descriptive Representation on Support for Judicial Nominees and the US Supreme Court,” is published in the journal Political Behavior. The paper was co-authored by Miles T. Armaly of the University of Mississippi and by Christopher Krewson of Brigham Young University.

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Note to Editors: The study abstract follows.

“The Influence of Descriptive Representation on Support for Judicial Nominees and the US Supreme Court”

Authors: Miles T. Armaly, University of Mississippi; Christopher N. Krewson, Brigham Young University; and Elizabeth A. Lane, North Carolina State University

Published: Aug. 28, Political Behavior

DOI: 10.1007/s11109-024-09966-2

Abstract: We argue that characteristics of unelected officials directly influence individuals’ perceptions and evaluations of them. These evaluations then have indirect, downstream consequences on evaluations of the institution. To test this, we fielded a unique survey with an oversample of Black Americans after the nomination of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Using a conjoint experimental design to randomize nominee race, we find that increased racial descriptive representation elicits more favorable views of the nominee and Court among Black respondents. Causal mediation analysis confirms our theoretical expectation that descriptive representation indirectly influences views of the Court through its effects on views of nominees. The effects we uncover are not confined to co-partisan nominees, indicating that descriptive representation may matter for more than policy reasons alone. Finally, our external validity test suggests these effects generalize beyond our experimental setting, with Black (but not white) respondents equally as supportive of an anonymous profile matching Justice Jackson’s characteristics as they are of Jackson herself.

This post was originally published in NC State News.