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Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on February 28, 2007
Public Opinion Quarterly 2007 71(1):40-66; doi:10.1093/poq/nfl044
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Issue Preferences and Evaluations of the U.S. Supreme Court

Marc J. Hetherington and Joseph L. Smith

Address correspondence to Marc J. Hetherington, e-mail: marc.j.hetherington{at}vanderbilt.edu.

While some previous studies have found that public support for the Supreme Court is related to the ideological direction of its decisions, these studies were based on data from the Warren Court era, a period of high profile judicial liberalism. Since then, the Court has grown much more conservative, although its decisions have carried a much lower profile. We show that the mass media have done little to allow ordinary Americans to follow this change. As a consequence, we find that public evaluations in the 1990s continued to reflect a 1960s understanding of the Court, with liberals on racial and gender issues as well as those least fearful of crime evaluating the Court most favorably. Only those who are both knowledgeable and highly motivated to follow Court outputs tracked its rightward shift on issues that are important to them.


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