Institutional Legitimacy, Procedural Justice, and Compliance with Supreme Court Decisions: A Question of Causality

In their essay, Tom Tyler and Ken Rasinski take issue with my analysis of legitimacy and procedural justice. Although my article covered a fair number of different issues, their critique focuses on one particular conclusion. I argued that citizen perceptions of procedural fairness by the U.S. Supreme Court contributed little to the willingness of citizens to comply with unpopular court decisions. Instead, compliance (or acquiescence) was most likely when citizens accorded high levels of diffuse support to the Supreme Court. That is, those who viewed the Supreme Court as a more legitimate institution were more likely to accede to an unpopular decision. I concluded (1989:489): “Thus there is some evidence that the legitimacy of the Court, at least as reflected in levels of diffuse support, affects compliance with unpopular decisons. No such evidence exists for perceptions of procedural justice.”