Policy, Politics, and Public Attitudes Toward the Supreme Court

We assess the importance of the public’s policy agreement with the Supreme Court on public approval of the court. Using survey data on a range of recent court cases, we measure respondents’ perceived ideological closeness to the court. Then, we test various theories of court approval (doctrinal, functional, attitudinal). People who believe the court has decided recent cases as they themselves would have done, or that judges share their partisanship, report higher court approval than those who perceive the court as ideologically distant from them. We compare these findings with similar effects of policy agreement on Congressional and Presidential approval.