Christopher N. Krewson

In examining public evaluations of governing institutions, are job approval and legitimacy related? This question has dominated scholarship on Supreme Court legitimacy for decades. Conventional wisdom suggests that specific support (e.g., job approval) and diffuse support (e.g., legitimacy) are independent. Specific support captures short-term orientations based on policy alignment with the Court. Legitimacy is a long-term perspective reflecting more fundamental support for the Court as a governing institution. We challenge the paradigm that job approval and legitimacy are largely unrelated concepts. Specifically, we employ a variety of statistical techniques and panel data to show that changes in legitimacy are a direct effect of changes in public approval. Salient decisions and Court vacancies directly shape approval and indirectly shape legitimacy through their effects on approval. Longitudinal analysis confirms that changes in job approval precede and predict changes in legitimacy. These results suggest that the Court needs public approval, and its public approval is rooted in outcome-oriented perceptions of its decisions and membership. Further, sustained low levels of approval will eventually erode legitimacy and limit the Court's influence over policy. Thus, like the outwardly political executive and legislative branches, it is important for the Court to build political capital through job approval.

How do Americans’ preferences over judicial philosophy influence their support for judges and judicial decisions? Using an experiment attached to an adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis, we find that people hold preferences over judicial philosophies, that they rely on those preferences to evaluate judges and decisions, and that those preferences are not simply stand-ins for ideology and partisanship. These findings suggest that to understand people’s support for judges and judicial decisions one must pay attention to judicial philosophy.

In this exploratory study, we examine political polarization regarding the online discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use data from Reddit to explore the differences in the topics emphasized by different subreddits according to political ideology. We also examine whether there are systematic differences in the credibility of sources shared by the subscribers of subreddits that vary by ideology, and in the tendency to share information from sources implicated in spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Our results show polarization in topics of discussion: the Trump, White House, and economic relief topics are statistically more prominent in liberal subreddits, and China and deaths topics are more prominent in conservative subreddits. There are also significant differences between liberal and conservative subreddits in their preferences for news sources. Liberal subreddits share and discuss articles from more credible news sources than conservative subreddits, and conservative subreddits are more likely than liberal subreddits to share articles from sites flagged for publishing COVID-19 misinformation.