Michael J Nelson

U.S. courts have long been thought to be held in special regard by the American public, and public support is theorized to protect institutions from interbranch aggression. At the same time, recent research underscores that institutional fealty and public reaction to court curbing is shaped by partisan concerns. Drawing on a survey experiment fielded in the U.S., we evaluate whether (1) the public is uniquely punitive toward incumbents who seek to undermine a court rather than an agency and (2) the extent to which these penalties are dependent upon shared partisanship with the proposer. We demonstrate that the public is less supportive of efforts to strip judicial power than analogous efforts to strip power from an executive agency, but that this penalty for court curbing dissipates in the face of copartisanship. This substantiates previous claims regarding the role of partisanship on shaping public attitudes about high courts but underscores that the American public may still hold the courts in unique regard.

Prosecutors have immense discretion to determine which offenses to charge, which cases to take to trial, and which sentences to recommend. Yet, even though many of the prosecutors who exercise this discretion over important crimes must face the electorate to keep their jobs, we know little about how the use of this discretion affects prosecutors’ electoral fortunes. Drawing on two experiments embedded in a nationally representative survey, we demonstrate that the public is more supportive of prosecutors who issue lenient sentences for low-level crimes. The results have important implications for criminal justice reform inasmuch as they provide a linkage between progressive prosecutorial behavior and respondents’ vote intentions.