The Legibility of Court Reforms

• In Event: Studying Judicial Legitimacy: Scandals, Communication, and Personal Impact

Abstract

We seek to identify the conditions under which citizens retaliate against incumbents who threaten judicial independence. Although public support for judicial institutions has long been posited as a critical facilitating factor for this mechanism to hold, the public must understand judicial independence as a concept and be able to evaluate reform proposals as a credible threat thereto. We characterize judicial reform proposals as more or less legible insofar as they represent threats to high court independence in the eyes of the public. This paper presents evidence regarding (a) how Americans conceptualize judicial independence and that (b) citizens judge jurisdiction stripping as a greater threat to the U.S. Supreme Court’s independence than court packing, relying on the results of a nationally representative survey and a convenience sample of Americans. Throughout the rest of our book, we report consistent evidence that the the legibility of the proposed reform corresponds to the severity of citizens’ responses to court curbing proposals, which is consistent with the theoretical framework we sketch out in this paper.

Authors

• Amanda Driscoll

• Michael J. Nelson, The Pennsylvania State University