Courting the Public: The Influence of Decision Attributes on Individuals’ Views of Court Opinions

Abstract

Scholars and judges commonly maintain that courts require institutional legitimacy in order to be an effective institution of government and that such legitimacy depends on judges making legally principled, neutral decisions. Two principal ways judges can signal the neutrality of decisions are the size of the majority coalition and the treatment of precedent: opinions with larger majorities or grounded in precedent project to the public that they were decided in accordance with the rule of law and thus based on impartial decision-making criteria. We use an experimental design to test whether these two decision attributes influence attitudes toward decisions, presenting individuals with mock newspaper articles reporting on Court decisions in which we systematically vary majority coalition size and treatment of precedent. Our data show that when the Court produces a unanimous (rather than divided) decisional coalition and when it follows (rather than overrules) precedent, individuals are more likely to agree with and accept a decision, even if they are ideologically predisposed to disagree with a given Court outcome.