William Mishler

THE SUPREME COURT AS A COUNTERMAJORITARIAN INSTITUTION? THE IMPACT OF PUBLIC OPINION ON SUPREME COURT DECISIONS

Although normative questions about the role of the Supreme Court as a countermajoritarian institution have long excited controversy in democratic theory, empirical questions about how far the Court acts contrary to majoritarian opinion have received less attention. Time series analyses for the period 1956–89 indicate the existence of a reciprocal and positive relationship between long-term trends in aggregate public opinion and the Courts collective decisions. The Courts ideological composition changes in response to previous shifts in the partisan and ideological orientation of the president and Congress. The Court also responds to public opinion at the margins even in the absence of membership change. Since 1981, the relationship has vanished or turned negative in direction. The Courts ideological balance has been upset by an unbroken string of conservative-to-moderate appointments, thereby undermining the dynamics that promote judicial responsiveness and raising questions about the majoritarianism of the contemporary and future Court.

Public Opinion, the Attitudinal Model, and Supreme Court Decision Making: A Micro-Analytic Perspective

Recent aggregate-level research on the United States Supreme Court suggests that shifting tides of public opinion can have important effects on Supreme Court decisions. Moreover, these effects can be both direct (i.e., unmediated by other institutions) and indirect (i.e., mediated through presidential elections and subsequent judicial appointments). This research extends this inquiry by examining the influence of public opinion on individual members of the Supreme Court during the period 1953-1992. Although the majority of justices during this period show little or no evidence of public opinion effects, a significant minority of justices show substantial effects. As predicted by social psychological theories, the impact of public opinion is greatest among moderate justices who are likely to hold critical swing positions on the Court. The effects of public opinion are in addition to significant agenda effects and suggest important refinements in the standard attitudinal model of judicial decision making.

Recapturing the Falklands: Models of Conservative Popularity, 1979–83

Recently, Sanders et al. have made the intriguing and counter-intuitive argument that the impact of the Falklands war on Conservative popularity was inconsequential. Their analyses raise important theoretical and methodological issues concerning the time-series analysis of party support. This present article contends that the stepwise regression procedures employed by Sanders et al. are misleading, particularly when predictor variables are highly intercorrelated. Box-Jenkins analyses demonstrate that the Falklands strongly influenced Conservative support, net of the effects of macroeconomic conditions and personal economic expectations. The significance of the latter variable in the models confirms Sanders et al. s argument about the role of subjective economic variables in party popularity functions. Non-economic variables are also relevant, however, and popularity functions that model them correctly will enhance our understanding of both the economics and the politics of party support.

Testing the Churchill Hypothesis: Popular Support for Democracy and its Alternatives

Whereas many studies of democratization evaluate it in idealist terms, Winston Churchill offered a relativist criterion, democracy being a lesser evil compared to other types of regime. Since everyone in a post-Communist society has lived in at least two different regimes, the New Democracies Barometer survey of post-Communist countries can ask people to evaluate five alternative regimes: a return to Communist rule, the army taking over, monarchy, rule by a strong leader, and decision making by economic experts. Factor analysis shows endorsement of three alternatives—the return to Communism, army rule, and personal dictatorship—form an authoritarianism scale. It also shows support for authoritarian rule is confined to a minority. Five hypotheses are tested to see what accounts for this. The political legacy of the past is more important than current government performance, economic attitudes, social structure differences, and national culture and traditions. Endorsement of economic technocrats making decisions is not related to authoritarianism; it reflects some national differences. Given the importance of experiencing both democratic and undemocratic regimes, the Churchill hypothesis does not apply in a country that has not yet attempted to introduce democratic institutions.

Popular influence on supreme court decisions

In their 1993 article in this Review , William Mishler and Reginald Sheehan reported evidence of both direct and indirect impacts of public opinion on Supreme Court decisions. Helmut Norpoth and Jeffrey Segal offer a methodological critique and in their own reanalysis of the data find, contrary to Mishler and Sheehan, no evidence for a direct path of influence from public opinion to Court decisions. Instead, they find an abrupt-permanent shift of judicial behavior consistent with an indirect model of influence whereby popularly elected presidents, through new appointments, affect the ideological complexion of the Court. In response, Mishler and Sheehan defend the direct public opinion linkage originally noted, at both individual and aggregate level; respond to the methodological critique; and offer further statistical analysis to support the aggregate linkages.

Resigned acceptance of an incomplete democracy: Russia's political equilibrium

To advance understanding of the present-day Russian regime, three political scientists set out a model of political authority in democratic and undemocratic regimes. New Russia Barometer surveys, especially a post-presidential election survey in March 2004, are used to document the amount of resigned acceptance of the Putin regime. The article reviews alternative hypotheses about why people may differ in their view of authority and tests the hypotheses statistically. The authors then consider circumstances, both economic and political, that might upset this equilibrium.

Comparing Regime Support in Non-democratic and Democratic Countries

A measure of popular support can be found in states with many different kinds of regimes, some democratic and some not, a point often overlooked by theories that concentrate exclusively on democratization. This article sets out nine hypotheses about how different social, economic and political contexts may influence regime support. The World Values Survey provides data about regime support in 36 countries in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Asia and India. The countries vary substantially in many ways, including whether or not they hold free elections and whether or not they apply the rule of law or are corrupt. Three influences on cross-national support are statistically significant: the extent to which the regime follows the rule of law; there are free and fair elections; and the economy maintains a high standard of living. The most important is the rule of law. The conclusion considers implications for new democracies, where free elections have often been introduced before the establishment of the rule of law and a high material living standard, thus making the dynamics of third wave regimes very different from earlier waves of democratization, and also requiring different explanatory theories.

Representation and leadership in post‐communist political systems

Ideally, a democratic system is representative and has effective leaders. But in post‐communist political systems it is an open question whether leadership and representation are mutually supportive or in conflict. Survey data from the New Democracies Barometer, used to analyse the priority that people in nine Central and East European countries give to representation in parliament and to strong leaders, allow a distinction to be made between representative democrats and leadership democrats, and to distinguish both from authoritarians who value strong leadership without parliament and those disaffected with both. A discriminant function analysis shows that political attitudes towards democracy and markets and towards order and economic security are most important in determining views of governance. National differences are indirectly significant, inasmuch as views of individuals about leadership vary with national context. Where there has been a history of repressive dictatorship, people are more likely ...

The supply of regimes: democratic and autocratic

Political systems pose a problem of choice: that choice presupposes a choice between better and worse, not between good and true or bad and false in the absolute sense. Giovanni Sartori In hindsight, the choice of institutions for an established regime may appear inevitable, but when a new regime is being created it is anything but. The institutions of democracies take many different forms, and member-states of the United Nations demonstrate that there are many forms of undemocratic rule too. Moreover, political elites who bargain about what the new regime ought to be can disagree about what makes a political system better or worse. A despotic or plebiscitarian regime is no more a failed democracy than a democracy is a failed despotism. Each is a distinctive type. The mass of citizens do not choose the regime that elites supply. Subjects are asked to accept or reject a bundle of institutions as a whole. If a referendum is held, there is no opportunity to pick and choose between the parts that constitute the new regime. The only choice is between voting for it or against it. Even if the ballot is held under conditions that are free and fair, the choice is hardly balanced if it is between endorsing institutions that have filled the void created by transformation or maintaining an uncertain and provisional authority. To describe a new regime as in transition does not tell us where it is coming from or where it is heading.