Gender Dynamics, Partisanship, and Public Support for the U.S. Supreme Court

• In Event: Understanding the Courts in a Post-Dobbs Era

Abstract

Does partisanship erode public support for the U.S. Supreme Court? Extant research largely assesses public support for the U.S. Supreme Court based on the partisan compatibility of respondents to the Court’s decisions. We contribute to the literature by examining whether gender dynamics and partisanship jointly condition support for the U.S. Supreme Court through experiments conducted three months after the Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Our preliminary results indicate that experimentally treating respondents with information about a conservative decision did not alter perceptions. Treating respondents with accurate information about a single, liberal decision, however, completely reversed the effects, with Democrats showing substantially higher levels of support for the Court compared to polarized Republicans. We find that these effects are not conditional on the gender identity of respondents. Examining the link between durable public perceptions and the gender identity of respondents in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs is critical to understanding the foundations of public support for the Court. We evaluate the robustness of our initial findings through a pre-registered follow-up experiment, with a nationally reflective sample, deployed a year later using a different set of Supreme Court cases. Moreover, in the second study, we presented respondents with a sequence of two decisions, and only the second decision predicted support across gender and partisan groups. These results demonstrate that public evaluations of the Supreme Court are highly malleable, leading to volatile support and prospects for elite manipulation.

Authors

• Ali Shiraz Masood, Oberlin College

• Christopher Krewson, Brigham Young University