The U.S. Supreme Court’s Legitimacy: How Public Opinion Updates

Abstract

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling abrogating women’s long-established right to abortion affords an opportunity to better understand how people update their attitudes toward the court. The data analyzed here reinforce evidence from earlier studies that the Dobbs ruling produced a substantial hit to the court’s institutional legitimacy. Why and how did this occur? A dominant model of attitude change posits that short-term evaluations of the court’s performance are informed by individual rulings and readily evolve but that institutional loyalty originates from different sources and is resistant to change. Loyalty is not entirely impervious to change, however: This research suggests that controversial decisions can cause a realignment of both types of court attitudes and that this seems to have happened with Dobbs. But, as I show via an experiment, evaluations typically change first, and under some (but perhaps extraordinary) circumstances, changed evaluations can undermine institutional loyalty.