Gregory A. Caldeira

The Etiology of Public Support for the Supreme Court

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On the Legitimacy of National High Courts

The purpose of this research is to examine theories of diffuse support and institutional legitimacy by testing hypotheses about the interrelationships among the salience of courts, satisfaction with court outputs, and diffuse support for national high courts. Like our predecessors, we are constrained by essentially cross-sectional data; unlike them, we analyze mass attitudes toward high courts in eighteen countries. Because our sample includes many countries with newly formed high courts, our cross-sectional data support several longitudinal inferences, using the age of the judicial institution as an independent variable. We discover that the U.S. Supreme Court is not unique in the esteem in which it is held and, like other courts, it profits from a tendency of people to credit it for pleasing decisions but not to penalize it for displeasing ones. Generally, older courts more successfully link specific and diffuse support, most likely due to satisfying successive, nonoverlapping constituencies.

Getting Out the Vote: Participation in Gubernatorial Elections

Scholarship on electoral turnout has long emphasized two main themes: explanations of nonvoting in terms of individual characteristics and in terms of contextual variables. These investigations have deeply enriched our understanding of electoral participation, but their limitations have also sensitized us to the remaining problems of explanation. Perusal of the work on American politics exposes a rather striking tendency in studies of participation to ignore, or soft pedal, the effects of active political mobilization. In this article we formulate two models of electoral turnout-socioeconomic and political mobilization-and apply them to aggregate data on voting in gubernatorial elections of 1978 and 1980. The socioeconomic model of turnout includes such influences as income, age, and educational attainment. To assess the effects of political mobilization, we have considered campaign spending, partisan competition, electoral margin, and the presence or absence of a simultaneous race for the United States Senate. Both of the models perform quite well individually, producing significant and meaningful coefficients and adequate fits. Yet in the final analysis we demonstrate that quite apart from major sources of variation in gubernatorial turnout-such as region and presidential versus nonpresidential years-the mobilizing influences of campaign activism and competitiveness have a strong impact on electoral participation; electoral law, i.e., closing date of registration, retains a small but significant effect on voting for governor; and socioeconomic characteristics, included in a fully specified model, have little to contribute independently to an explanation of electoral turnout. These findings are very much in the same vein as related cross-national investigations, which emphasize the crucial role of electoral law and political parties and downplay individual characteristics as determinants of electoral participation. On the basis of the research reported here, we argue that scholars need to pay more attention to political mobilization as an explanation of electoral turnout. In the presidential election between Cox and Harding in 1920, only half of the eligible voters participated. This relatively low turnout, together with the historically minimal rates of participation in state and local elections, created deep concern among those who believed that reasonably high levels of political involvement are crucial in maintaining a healthy democratic politics. It was in this atmosphere of worry about low electoral turnout that Charles E. Merriam and Harold F. Gosnell (1924) conducted, in the City of Chicago, the first systematic study of nonvoting. Subsequently, Gosnell (1927) went even further and executed the first experimental study in modern political science, demonstrating conditions that could stimulate electoral turnout. We, too, worry about low participation in elections today at every level of government, and we believe these classic studies

Measuring Attitudes toward the United States Supreme Court

It is conventional in research on the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court to rely on a survey question asking about confidence in the leaders of the Court to indicate something about the esteem with which that institution is regarded by the American people. The purpose of this article is to investigate the validity of this measure. Based on a nationally representative survey conducted in 2001, we compare confidence with several different measures of Court legitimacy. Our findings indicate that the confidence replies seem to reflect both short-term and long-term judgments about the Court, with the greater influence coming from satisfaction with how the Court is performing at the moment. We suggest a new set of indicators for measuring the legitimacy of the Court and offer some evidence on the structure of the variance in these items.

Neither the Purse Nor the Sword: Dynamics of Public Confidence in the Supreme Court

Systematic study of changes in support for the U.S. Supreme Court across time has not been undertaken. Armed with a time series of observations from 1966 through 1984, I provide a description of the ebb and flow of public esteem for the Court. Then I outline and test several plausible propositions about the dynamics of support. Statistical analyses compel the conclusion that apart from a relatively constant core of support, increases in judicial activism, inflation, and solicitude for the rights of the accused decreased confidence in the Court; the events surrounding Watergate and increases in presidential popularity and the public salience of the Court brought about increased popular esteem for the high bench. Previous scholars, based on cross-sections of individuals, have emphasized the publics ignorance of and disinterest in the Supreme Court and judicial policy making. The responsiveness of public support for the Court in the aggregate to political events and shifts in the behavior of the justices stands in stark contrast to the conventional image of United States citizenry as singularly out of touch with and unmoved by the Supreme Court.

The Mobilization of Voters in Congressional Elections

Why is it that some voters go to the polls on election day, and others do not? Scholars of electoral turnout have too often restricted themselves to a relatively narrow range of independent variables, and have failed to include important political influences in analyses. In this study, grounded in the data of the 1978 National Election Study and augmented by additional contextual variables, we develop five alternative models of electoral turnout--legal restrictions, socioeconomic characteristics, social-psychological attitudes, economic conditions, and political mobilization. We especially emphasize the mobilization of voters via campaign spending, partisan competition, contestation of elections, and the presence of other, more salient races. Political mobilization survives and thrives even when we take into account the more conventional explanations of turnout at the polls. In conclusion, we suggest that accountings for participation which omit political mobilization are partial and suspect.

The Legitimacy of Transnational Legal Institutions: Compliance, Support, and the European Court of Justice

Theory: We use competing propositions from the literature on institutional legitimacy and compliance to trace the sources of acceptance of, or the propensity to comply with, judicial decisions. Hypotheses: Generally, institutions with a store of legitimacy are more successful at evoking acquiescence to their decisions. We expect willingness to accept an unpopular decision to be most prevalent among those who are strongly committed to the institution itself, who perceive the Court as using fair procedures to make its decisions, who are strongly attached to the rule of law, and who are neutral about the issue on which the Court has made a decision. Methods: Regression analysis of items from a survey of the mass publics in the twelve member-states of the European Union in fall 1992. Results: The European Court of Justice does not have an extensive store of good will among ordinary citizens of the European Union. Few people are willing to accept a Court of Justice decision they find objectionable. There is, however, a moderately strong relationship between legitimacy-i.e., diffuse support-and acceptance. Perceptions of procedural justice play little role in the process, although basic legal values (e.g., attitudes toward the rule of law) contribute to acceptance within some countries. In general, our research demonstrates that legitimacy is important for acceptance and probably for compliance; and that the European Court of Justice must tend to what may be an emerging shortfall of legitimacy for the high bench of the European Union.

Amici Curiae before the Supreme Court: Who Participates, When, and How Much?

Our purpose is to describe and compare the variety and types of organizations that participate as amici curiae before the United States Supreme Court for decisions on petitions for writs of certiorari and jurisdictional statements as well as on decisions on the merits. We have classified all amici in cases from the 1982 Term of the Court according to their bases of membership--for example, citizen-based membership of advocacy groups, corporations, staff organizations such as public interest law firms, trade or professional associations, and so forth. Through this simple classificatory scheme, we seek answers to the fundamental questions of who participates as amicus curiae, when, and how much. Our findings reveal that the Supreme Court is remarkably accessible to a diverse array of organized interests at both stages of decision.

Why Do People Accept Public Policies They Oppose? Testing Legitimacy Theory with a Survey-Based Experiment

The orthodox answer to the question posed in the title of this article is that the legitimacy of institutions has something to do with acquiescence to unwelcome public policy decisions. We investigate that conventional wisdom using an experiment embedded within a representative national sample in the United States. We test hypotheses concerning not only the effect of institutional legitimacy on acquiescence, but also the influence of partisanship, the rule of law, and simple instrumentalism on willingness to accept an objectionable policy decision. Our analyses reveal that legitimacy does matter for acquiescence, and that the Supreme Court is more effective at converting its legitimacy into acceptance than is Congress. Yet, many important puzzles emerge from the data (e.g., partisanship is not influential), so we conclude that Legitimacy Theory still requires much additional empirical inquiry.

The Supreme Court and the US Presidential Election of 2000: Wounds, Self-Inflicted or Otherwise?

The conventional wisdom about the US Supreme Court and the 2000 presidential election is that the Court wounded itself by participating in such a partisan dispute. By ‘wounded’ people mean that the institution lost some of its legitimacy. Evidence from our survey, conducted in early 2001, suggests little if any diminution of the Court’s legitimacy in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, even among African Americans. We observe a relationship between evaluations of the opinion and institutional legitimacy, but the bulk of the causality seems to flow from loyalty to evaluations of the case, not vice versa. We argue that legitimacy frames perceptions of the Court opinion. Furthermore, increased awareness of the activities of the Court tends to reinforce legitimacy by exposing people to the powerful symbols of law. In 2000, legitimacy did indeed seem to provide a reservoir of good will that allowed the Court to weather the storm created by its involvement in Florida’s presidential election.