Is the Supreme Court Conservative or Liberal? It Depends on Whether You Read the Paper
Scholars of the Supreme Court confront a puzzle: why do conservatives in the public like Supreme Court less than liberals, even though the contemporary Court leans conservative? One answer is that attitudes toward the Court are “lagging” behind these changes in the Court’s composition. In short, people still have the well-known decisions of the more liberal Warren Court in mind when they think about the contemporary Court. See this piece by Marc Hetherington and Joseph Smith.
My colleague Brandon Bartels and his co-author Christopher Johnson have a different answer. They find that although the Court’s decisions under, say, Rehnquist, were more conservative than its decisions under Warren, that’s not reflected in the cases that get lots of media coverage.
A simple way to show this is to ask whether a particular Court decision was on the front page of the New York Times the day after the decision was announced. Call these “salient” cases, knowing that they were likely covered in many other media as well.
When Bartels and Johnson looked at civil liberties and civil rights cases and then broke them down by salience, they found that the “salient” cases were more liberal than the “non-salient cases.” Here is the graph:
This helps explain why conservatives like the Court less than liberals, but in a different way. It’s not that the public hasn’t “caught up” with the Court, it’s that they are hearing and learning more about the Court’s liberal decisions than its conservative decisions.
Comments
John,
How do they handle the determination of causality (specifically, direction)? It seems at least somewhat plausible to me that the media’s disproportionate focus on “liberal” judgments (not sure what that means) could be in response to higher consumer interest in those decisions from both sides of the aisle.
In other words, might an equally convincing explanation of these data be that conservatives like seeing stories about “liberal” SC decisions because such stories confirm their priors (and liberals like them because, well, they’re counterintuitive), and the media are simply giving the people what they want? On this telling, the stories might as easily be effect as cause …
Posted by: Joel | August 13, 2009 03:03 PM
Joel, they’re actually not making any arguments about why the media does this. They’re simply observing that it does, which offers an explanation for the public opinion puzzle.
My guess is that it’s an artifact of the perceived “newsworthiness” of the liberal decisions — e.g., Lawrence v. Texas.
Posted by: John Sides | August 13, 2009 07:49 PM
We should see if the cases on the cover of the NYT are also the cases lambasted from the pulpit and in the Limbaugh broadcasting room.
Posted by: Piffle_dragon | August 13, 2009 10:01 PM
Haven’t read the paper, so always dangerous to ask, but: Did the authors control for conservative attitudes toward Congress and the presidency/executive branch, too? Maybe conservatives just have a lower opinion of all governmental institutions than liberals.
Posted by: Emery | August 14, 2009 02:10 PM