The Case Salience Index, Public Opinion, and Decision Making on the U.S. Supreme Court

Recent work on the U.S. Supreme Court argues that Supreme Court decision making is constrained by several factors, including public opinion. These constraints are not uniform across cases, however, and some suggest that public opinion may only act as a constraint conditional on the salience of the case. Using a dichotomous measure of salience, prior studies finds mixed results as to whether the Court may alter its decisions in cases of low or high salience. By updating our previous measure of salience (Collins and Cooper 2012 Collins, Todd A., and Christopher A. Cooper. 2012. “Case Salience and Media Coverage of Supreme Court Decisions: Toward a New Measure.” Political Research Quarterly 65: 396–407.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and recasting it with slightly different measurement properties, we find that public opinion influences court decisions in cases of very low salience and cases of very high salience. This research has important implications for our understanding of whether the Supreme Court is insulated from public pressures or if it simply reflects the public mood of the day. The analysis introduced here also provides a useful example of a new salience dataset that should be valuable to judicial scholars.