Abstract Conducting novel surveys that allow the first direct comparisons between Supreme Court decisions and public preferences, Jessee et al. (2022) find that the Court moved sharply to the right between 2020 and 2021, and attribute this change to the replacement of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Justice Amy Coney Barrett. We extend Jessee et al.’s analysis by presenting additional data gathered between 2022-2025. We find that the Supreme Court maintained its conservative position in 2022, but then moderated in 2023 following the backlash to the decision in Dobbs v. Mississippi (2022), which repealed Roe v. Wade (1973). We show that despite the composition of the Court remaining stable and the identity of the median voter being unchanged between 2021-2025, there is an ebb-and-flow to the representativeness of Court decisions, with the institution sometimes further to the right of the public and then sometimes shifting closer to the average voter. However, despite these important periodic shifts, the Court has since 2021 generally remained in a more conservative position relative to the ideological positioning of the American electorate. Our findings have important implications for the legitimacy of the Court and the stability of the rule of law.
Jessee et al. (Tue,) studied this question.
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