Valerie Hoekstra

The Supreme Court and Local Public Opinion

Most research suggests that the mass public knows very little about the Supreme Court and, consequently, that decisions do not affect attitudes toward the Court. I argue that where there is sufficient access to information about Court cases and when the issues are perceived as important, people pay attention and use this information in their evaluation of the Court. The research is based on a series of two-wave panel studies that examine the effect of Supreme Court cases in the local communities where the controversies began. The results show that a substantial number of residents heard about the Courts decision and subsequently changed their evaluation of the Supreme Court, especially those who live in the immediate community. The results suggest that we need to consider other circumstances in which people hear about and care about Supreme Court decisions.

The Shepherding of Local Public Opinion: The Supreme Court and Lamb's Chapel

We argue that the standard methodology for assessing the impact of Supreme Court decisions on public opinion, which relies on national surveys to measure public attitudes before and after relevant Court decisions, fails, among other grounds, to account for the fact that the overwhelming majority of Court decisions speak to particular constituencies only. We assess the impact of the Supreme Courts decision in Lambs Chapel v. Center Moriches on the geographic constituencies involved in the case. We interviewed a random sample of residents in the town of Center Moriches and in the surrounding county of Suffolk, New York, before and after the decision. Consistent with the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion (Petty and Cacioppo 1986), we find that high levels of information about the decision increases support for the Courts decision among those for whom the decision is relatively less salient.

The Supreme Court and Opinion Change An Experimental Study of the Court's Ability to Change Opinion

In this study the author examines the extent to which the Supreme Court acts as an opinion leader through its ability to induce attitude change. The author employs an experimental design with liberal and conservative rulings on one economic and one civil liberties issue, comparing the influence of the Supreme Court, Congress, and a nonpartisan think tank as sources of policies. The design was chosen in an attempt to eliminate outside sources of influence and to determine better the Supreme Courts ability to cause change in opinion. The results demonstrate that under some circumstances the Court can indeed influence opinion in the direction of its rulings, especially for those who regard the Court positively.

Do Political Preferences Change? A Longitudinal Study of U.S. Supreme Court Justices

Do the political preferences of U.S. Supreme Court justices change over time? Judicial specialists are virtually unanimous in their response: The occasional anomaly notwithstanding, most jurists evince consistent voting behavior over the course of their careers. Still, for all the research that presupposes the consistency of preferences, it is startling to find that scholars have yet to explore rigorously the assumption of stability. We fill this gap by describing the behavioral patterns of the 16 justices who sat on the U.S. Supreme Court for 10 or more terms, and began and completed their service some-time between the 1937 and 1993 terms. The data reveal that many experienced significant change over time-a result with important implications for virtually all longitudinal work on the Court.

Delaying Justice: The Supreme Court’s Decision to Hear Rearguments

Some of the Supreme Court’s most famous cases—from Roe v. Wade (1973) to Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—have been decided only after being held over and argued a second time. While few cases take this path, scholars have offered no systematic account for why the Court would ever take such a tack. We develop hypotheses about when reargument is most likely to occur, and test them on all formally decided cases between 1946 and 1985. More specifically, we focus on how justices’ uncertainty about case outcomes affects the Court’s decision to seek reargument. Our findings demonstrate that reargument is most likely to occur when multiple levels of uncertainty are present, even when we control for other factors that have been raised as explanations for this phenomenon.

Competing Constraints: State Court Responses to Supreme Court Decisions and Legislation on Wages and Hours

This article examines state supreme court implementation of Supreme Court precedent when deciding cases challenging state legislation. While previous research provides a wealth of insight into how state contextual and institutional features constrain state court decisionmaking and how lower courts respond to Supreme Court precedent, very little research explicitly examines state court decisionmaking when both constraints are present. By integrating the findings of previous research, I develop and test hypotheses about the effect of these different actors on state court decisionmaking. The results show that state courts are indeed constrained by both state and federal actors. The results also suggest that there may be instances where policies are so salient to both state actors and to the U.S. Supreme Court that the influence of the state court’s own policy preferences may be minimal. The findings provide important evidence about the importance of competing constraints on state supreme court decisionmaking.

Just the Facts? Media Coverage of Female and Male High Court Appointees in Five Democracies

In this article, we examine gender differences in news media portrayals of nominees to high courts and whether those differences vary across country and time. Although past research has examined gender differences in news media coverage of candidates for elective office, few studies have looked at media coverage of high court nominees. As women are increasingly nominated to courts around the world, it is important to examine how nominations are covered by the news media and whether there is significant variation in coverage based on gender. We analyze media coverage of high court justices in five democracies: Argentina, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States. We compare coverage of women appointed to the highest court with coverage of the most temporally proximate male nominees. We also compare coverage over time within each country as well as between countries that nominated women early with those that did so more recently. We find some evidence of gendered coverage, especially with regard to the attention paid to the gender of the women appointees. digitalcommons.unl.edu Earlier versions of this article were presented at the “Women, Media, and Politics: A Comparative Perspective” conference at Arizona State University, April 2014, and at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C. We wish to thank Kim Fridkin, Gina Woodall, and the anonymous reviewers for feedback and suggestions. We would also like to thank Eduardo Aleman, Ernesto Calvo, Elisabeth Gidengil, Shireen Hassim, and Mark Jones for helpful advice and suggestions for our newspaper sources and Jennifer Kahn for research assistance. Media Coverage of Female & Male High Court Appointees 255 Q: It seemed to me that male judges do much more abrasive things all the time, and it goes unremarked. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes, the notion that Sonia is an aggressive questioner—what else is new? Has anybody watched Scalia or Breyer up on the bench? —New York Times Magazine, July 12, 2009 In May 2009, President Barack Obama announced his intention to nominate Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court. Immediately, the New Republic aired criticisms that Sotomayor is “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench.” 1 Subsequent news outlets picked up the story, including National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, which asked, “Is Sonia Sotomayor Mean?” 2 It was not the first time a female justice had been described as aggressive. A 1994 Newsweek article on Ruth Bader Ginsburg was entitled “‘Rude’ Ruth.” 3 Recent studies in the United States find fewer gender differences in the amount and tone of media coverage of female candidates in recent elections (Brooks 2013; Dolan 2014; Hayes and Lawless 2015). Yet are findings from studies of candidates generalizable to women in other political realms? Specifically, are there gender differences in news media portrayals of nominees to high courts? Further, do these differences vary across countries and over time? As calls increase for greater numbers of women on high courts around the world (Hoekstra 2010; Hoekstra, Kittilson, and Bond 2014; Williams and Thames 2008), it is important to examine whether there is systematic variation in coverage of nominees based on gender. Understanding how the media covers high court nominees is essential, as this coverage may influence appointment outcomes, thereby shaping the composition of the court. Moreover, media coverage may also have long-run implications for the willingness of government officials to nominate women and for women to accept nominations. Negative coverage (especially if it is inaccurate) may reduce the efficacy of women judges by lowering their credibility with their colleagues, their staff, and importantly, lower court judges and other officials charged with 1. Jeffrey Rosen, “The Case Against Sotomayor,” New Republic, May 3, 2009, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/the-case-against-sotomayor (accessed March 10, 2016). 2. Nina Totenberg, “Is Sonia Sotomayor Mean?,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, June 15, 2009, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105343155 (accessed March 10, 2016). 3. “‘Rude’ Ruth,” Newsweek, April 10, 1994, http://www.newsweek.com/rude-ruth-186990 (accessed March 10, 2016). 256 Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon et al. in Politics & Gender 12 (2016) carrying out their decisions. The coverage creates a first impression of the nominee’s competence and qualifications (see Harp, Loke, and Bachmann 2010). Finally, negative media coverage might also affect women’s judicial ambitions. As Fox and Lawless (2010, 2011) observe, one of the greatest impediments to seeking elected office for women is that they are socialized to perceive themselves as less qualified for office, despite having objectively similar backgrounds as their male counterparts. An important part of the socialization process can be media coverage of the institution, especially when that institution has been predominantly male. Similar socialization effects might hinder women’s considerations of their qualifications for judicial appointments. We analyze differences in news media coverage of high court justices in five democracies: Argentina, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States. We compare coverage of women appointed to the highest court with coverage of the most temporally proximate male appointees. These five cases provide us with variation across the type of judicial system, presidential/parliamentary system, region, the number of subsequent nominations, and the timing of the first woman to be nominated (which varies from 1981 in the United States to 2004 in Argentina). This cross-time and cross-country comparison sheds light on the conditions that ameliorate differences in the media’s coverage of male and female nominees. Gender is a social process that assigns meaning to sex differences, and judicial selections are events in which gender is constructed (Kenney 2012). As did Kenney (2012, 45), we find that the social construction of sex differences is not identical across countries or time, but it nevertheless persists “with variations in different contexts.” Our findings suggest that gendered coverage often frames nominees in terms that reference professionally irrelevant factors (such as personal and family life) rather than professional qualifications and achievements. Gender and News Media Coverage Nearly all research on gender in news media coverage focuses on candidates for elected office in the United States. Initial studies demonstrated that compared with men, women candidates in U.S. elections received less media coverage, less prominent coverage (Kahn 1992, 1994; Kahn and Goldenberg 1991), more negative coverage, greater focus on the viability of their campaigns (Kahn 1996), and greater emphasis on appearance and personal life; the coverage also Media Coverage of Female & Male High Court Appointees 257 deemphasized individual accomplishments and often corresponded with common gender stereotypes. However, Smith (1997) and Jalalzai (2006) report a general trend toward more equitable coverage and less gender stereotyping for candidates for the U.S. Senate or governorships. Bystrom, Robertson, and Banwart’s (2001) analysis of the 2000 Senate and gubernatorial primaries concludes that women candidates received more coverage than men, suggesting less pronounced differences over time. Across U.S., Australian, and Canadian elections, women politicians are more often portrayed in terms of feminine stereotypes (Acker 2003; Kittilson and Fridkin 2008; Robinson and Saint-Jean 1995). In television news coverage of the 1993, 1997, and 2000 Canadian elections, messages of female party leaders were less likely to receive neutral coverage than those of male party leaders (Gidengil and Everitt 2003). In the 2000 election, newspaper headlines employed more aggressive language for male party leaders and more passive language for the female party leader (Sampert and Trimble 2003). The Canadian and Australian media emphasize women’s physical attributes and backgrounds (Deutchman and Ellison 2004; Everitt 2003; Gingras 1995). Only a few comparative studies examine gender differences in media coverage of heads of state, but they suggest that differences in press treatment appear to be more dramatic for highly visible, prestigious positions, and these differences do not appear much diminished over time. Norris (1997) finds that women receive less coverage than their male counterparts. 4 Murray (2010) shows that, cross-nationally, female candidates for executive office receive more coverage about their appearance than their male peers. Furthermore, news stories on female leaders commonly mention gender-related themes, employing the “first woman” frame. Taken together, existing research on elected office shows that gender stereotypes are often invoked in news coverage of elected officials. How, then, does the news media cover women in nonelected, appointed positions such as those on supreme and constitutional courts? We think this is an open and important question. Although the literature on elections leads us to expect less or gender-stereotyped news coverage for women relative to men, this may not hold for high court 4. Elizabeth Dole’s bid for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination received less coverage and less positive coverage than the campaigns of some male opponents, including those trailing her in the polls. The coverage she received focused on her appearance, her sex, and her campaign’s viability (see, for instance, Aday and Devitt 2001; Bystrom 2006; Heldman, Carroll, and Olson 2005). 258 Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon et al. in Politics & Gender 12 (2016) nominees. In elections, higher amounts of news media coverage benefit all candidates by increasing visibility and name recognition. However, where judges are appointed, it is not clear that a lack of publicity is a negative; potential