Framing the Judiciary: Effects of Partisan, Procedural, and Populist Frames on Apex Court Perceptions in Czechia

Students of comparative law have for long suggested that attempts by the elected leaders to undermine the independence of the judiciary will be electorally costly. The widely shared norms on the inappropriateness of interfering with the judiciary would thus sustain the institutional checks and balances and the institutions of constitutionalism. The increasing evidence, obtained to a large degree in experimental studies in countries with robust judiciaries, suggests that the perceptions of courts’ legitimacy may be reduced by exposing voters to evidence of the courts’ partisan orientations and procedural illegitimacy of their decisions. Furthermore, the ascent of populist politicians suggests that the would-be authoritarian leaders may successfully undermine judicial legitimacy by appealing to the judges’ unelected nature and inherent counter-majoritarian tendencies. Populists ground their rhetoric in juxtaposing the "people" against the "corrupt elite," creating a normative tension with the ideas of a liberal-democratic process where elected powers are checked to limit the state's interference with individual rights. To test whether one observes the effects of partisanship and procedural fairness on voters' perceptions of the courts outside the U.S. context, and to assess whether populist messages produce comparable effects, a pre-registered survey experiment is conducted in the context of the Czech Republic, a country that until recently has had both a populist executive and a strong and independent Constitutional Court. By embedding populist messages within experimental survey vignettes and collecting citizens' perceptions of the highest court of the Czech Republic, the study aims to assess how such messages affect the legitimacy of judicial institutions. The study finds no significant effects of messages emphasizing judges' educational and unelected status, of messages related to the effects of the Court's decision on one's preferred political party, and of messages portraying the Court's decision as procedurally irregular. The results of the study suggest that the marginalization of robust judiciaries in backsliding democracies may be a largely elite-driven institutional process, with uncertain electoral payoffs.