The Political Consequences of Supreme Court Consensus: Media Coverage, Public Opinion, and Unanimity as a Public-Facing Strategy

This Article analyses the Supreme Court’s need to tout its unanimous decisions in light of public perception and press coverage. Zilis argues the Court is mindful of the press’ coverage of non-unanimous rulings, which are often framed in unfavorable terms. The Article then argues how public perception of unanimity in the Court can help foster favorable coverage in the press, and increased public approval, by suggesting higher credibility for the Court, limiting the public to competing perspectives, and shaping the public’s understanding of decisions through the media. The Article conclude these strategies can drive public approval and, ultimately, public support for policies adopted by the Court

Do Americans Perceive Diverse Judges as Inherently Biased

Although women and minorities hold an increasing share of judgships in the United States, they remain underrepresented. We explore Americans’ perceptions of the bias of women and minority judges – one of the possible challenges to creating a diverse bench. We argue that prejudice against these groups manifests in a subtle way, in the belief that diverse judges cannot fairly adjudicate controversies that involve their ingroup. To test our theory, we use a list experiment specifically developed to minimize social desirability effects. We find that many respondents rate female and Hispanic judges to be biased decision makers. Our results highlight the nature of prejudice against female and Hispanic judges and suggest multiple important implications. They shed light on the reasons why female and Hispanic candidates for judgships may win at a lower rate and also suggest negative implications for the legitimacy of their decisions

Ascriptive Characteristics and Perceptions of Impropriety in the Rule of Law: Race, Gender, and Public Assessments of Whether Judges Can Be Impartial

Perceptions of procedural fairness influence the legitimacy of the law and because procedures are mutable, reforming them can buttress support for the rule of law. Yet legal authorities have recently faced a distinct challenge: accusations of impropriety based on their ascriptive characteristics (e.g., gender, ethnicity). We study the effect of these traits in the context of the U.S. legal system, focusing on the conditions under which citizens perceive female and minority judges as exhibiting impropriety and how this compares with perceptions of their white and male counterparts. We find that Americans use a judge\u27s race and gender to make inferences about which groups the judge favors, whether she is inherently biased, and whether she should recuse. Notably, we find drastically different evaluations of female and Hispanic judges among the political right and left

Blurring Institutional Boundaries: Judges\u27 Perceptions of Threats to Judicial Independence

The legislature wields multiple tools to limit judicial power, but scholars have little information about how judges interpret variant threats and which they find most concerning. To provide insight, we conduct original interviews regarding legislative threats to courts with over two dozen sitting federal judges, representing all tiers of the federal judiciary. We find that judges have a nuanced understanding of threats and tend to identify components of legislative proposals that threaten formal institutional powers as more concerning than those challenging policy set by judges. This distinction has broad implications for our understanding of judicial behavior at the federal level

Bring the Masks and Sanitizer: The Surprising Bipartisan Consensus About Safety Measures For In-Person Voting During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Requiring masks at the polls might implicate a clash between two vital rights: the constitutional right to vote and the right to protect one’s health. Yet the debate during the 2020 election over requirements to wear a mask at the polls obscured one key fact: a majority of Americans supported a mask mandate for voting. That is the new insight we provide in this Essay: when surveyed, Americans strongly supported safety measures for in-person voting, and that support was high regardless of partisanship. One implication of our results is that by making some widely supported safety modifications, state election officials likely can increase, in a non-polarizing fashion, voters’ feelings of safety when going to their polling place, especially during a global health emergency

I Respectfully Dissent: Linking Judicial Voting Behavior, Media Coverage, and Public Responses in the Study of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions.

This dissertation is a study of what happens after the Supreme Court rules. It begins by identifying a critical feature absent from existing studies of judicial policy legitimation: the information conveyed by the press to the public. The dissertation combines disparate research, theory, and the use of multiple methods to answer important questions about Supreme Court influence. I develop Dissensus Dynamics Theory to show that voting outcomes on the Supreme Court play the most important role in shaping how the press portrays legal controversies. The central place of voting outcomes comes from their value to journalists who must characterize judicial decisions while subject to considerable constraints. In cases where dissent and division on the bench is high, news organizations portray rulings in negative terms, drawing on frames raised by dissenting justices and by critics of the Court. To explore Dissensus Dynamics Theory more rigorously, I employ a diverse range of tests. A case study of property rights coverage demonstrates the direct and indirect impacts of dissenting votes on coverage. I show that dissent encourages the press to seek out critics of a ruling, but also to highlight evocative language from dissenting opinions. As such, dissent leads to media portrayals of property rights law that emphasize multiple, competing perspectives in place of frames more deferential to the Court. I examine Dissensus Dynamics Theory further by coupling content analysis data with statistical tests. I find evidence that judicial dissensus increases the prevalence of negative frames in newspaper and cable news accounts of decisions. Dissensus also increases the prevalence of aggressive rhetoric in cable news coverage. And ideological diversity in majority coalitions affects coverage under certain conditions. These results hold even when taking into account the most powerful alternative explanations to Dissensus Dynamics Theory. In the final chapters, I demonstrate why media coverage matters. Experimental evidence shows that negative frames limit support for Supreme Court rulings, even as subjects continue to view the institution favorably. These findings bridge what have been, until now, disparate lines of inquiry involving law and politics, political communication, and public opinion.PhDPolitical ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97996/1/zilisma_1.pd

Protecting minority rights can undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in the eyes of many Americans

Since 2010, the Supreme Court has handed down a number of landmark decisions which have dramatically increased gay rights in the US. But these decisions have often led to a backlash. Using national survey data, Michael A. Zilis finds that the Supreme Court's decisions actually undermined its legitimacy in the eyes of those who dislike gays, despite the Court's fundamental mission to protect the rights of vulnerable groups

The Sources and Consequences of Political Rhetoric: Issue Importance, Collegial Bargaining, and Disagreeable Rhetoric in Supreme Court Opinions

How do political actors use rhetoric after an initial policy battle? We explore factors that lead Supreme Court justices to integrate disagreeable rhetoric into opinions. Although disagreeable language has negative consequences, we posit that justices pay this cost for issues with high personal significance. At the same time, we argue that integrating disagreeable rhetoric has a deleterious effect on the institution by reducing majority coalition size. Examining opinions from 1946 to 2011 using text-based measures of disagreeable rhetoric, we model the language of opinion writing as well as explore the consequences for coalition size. Our findings suggest serious implications for democratic institutions and political rhetoric

Bring the Masks and Sanitizer: The Surprising Bipartisan Consensus About Safety Measures for In-Person Voting During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Requiring masks at the polls might implicate a clashbetween two vital rights: the constitutional right to vote and theright to protect one’s health. Yet the debate during the 2020election over requirements to wear a mask at the polls obscuredone key fact: a majority of Americans supported a maskmandate for voting. That is the new insight we provide in thisEssay: when surveyed, Americans strongly supported safetymeasures for in-person voting, and that support was highregardless of partisanship. One implication of our results isthat by making some widely supported safety modifications,state election officials likely can increase, in a non-polarizingfashion, voters’ feelings of safety when going to their pollingplace, especially during a global health emergency