Public Reaction to Supreme Court Decisions.

By Valerie J. Hoekstra. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 190p. $60.00.

What effect do Supreme Court rulings have on public opinion? Many have long cherished (or lamented) the idea that the public esteem the Court enjoys allows it to confer a certain legitimacy on particular issue positions. As a result, the story goes, public opinion tends to shift in the direction of Court decisions. At the same time, highly unpopular rulings might undermine that esteem and threaten the Court's reservoir of public support, an important resource for ensuring compliance with its rulings. The possibility that the Court, seeking to protect its public standing, will not stray too far from what is acceptable to the public is often suggested as an important source of indirect accountability for the independent judiciary.

The impact of the Supreme Court on public opinion thus warrants our careful attention. Yet the standard public-opinion polls used in political science are designed around the topics and calendar of the other branches. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that research thus far has yielded incomplete and indecisive findings. In Public Reaction to Supreme Court Decisions, Valerie Hoekstra's innovative surveys are constructed around the schedule and issues of the Court, allowing her to discern the Court's impact on public opinion in ways not possible in previous research. Hoekstra's approach is to look for responsiveness to the Court's rulings in “those places where access to information is sufficient to produce informed citizens” (p. 6). To this end, she traces the reaction to four “ordinary” (p. 33) cases in the communities in which each conflict originated. In each of her four two-wave panel studies (respondents are surveyed before and after the ruling is announced), samples are drawn from both the immediate and surrounding community, allowing comparisons between those with the presumed greatest level of interest in the case (immediate) and those with exposure to the same information but presumably less inherent interest (surrounding).

After delineating the context of each case (Chapter 2), Hoekstra examines media coverage and public awareness in Chapter 3. As one might expect, coverage of each case tends to be substantially greater in the local press than in the national media. As a result, the local community generally reports levels of case awareness that exceed what typically is found for Supreme Court cases in national surveys. High levels of awareness suggest a population with enough information about the ruling that persuasion by the Court is at least a possibility. Yet in Chapter 4, the author finds only mixed evidence of persuasion effects. Small aggregate attitude shifts in the direction of the Court's decision occur in just two of her four cases, and as she predicts, only among respondents from the surrounding communities. While citizens in the immediate community are more aware of the case, Hoekstra reasons that because her analysis shows that they also attach more importance to it, their attitudes may be less susceptible to change. In contrast to the expected role of “source credibility” (p. 11), Hoekstra uncovers no evidence that those with higher initial levels of Court support are more likely to adjust their issue attitudes. The consistently high levels of Court support among most respondents, combined with the generally small degree of attitude change, may explain this unexpected result. Finally, in Chapter 5, Hoekstra asks what impact these rulings have on support for the Court. Here she finds clear evidence that citizens update their evaluation of the Court in response to its decisions. Among those who know and care about a case, the Court's actions directly affect its level of support.

The author's unique approach offers insight into both the potential for and limits of the Court's impact. Under certain conditions and for certain groups, the Court's decisions can and do affect public opinion. However, the Court seems to be the subject of evaluation rather than a source of persuasion: Citizens appear more likely to change their opinion of the Court than to change their opinion on the issue. As Hoekstra recognizes, these results may be linked to a paradox: Awareness seems requisite for a Court's decision to affect attitudes, but citizens who have reason to be most cognizant of a case might also have particularly strong, and thus perhaps inflexible, opinions on the issue, hindering the Court's impact. The image one is left with is not so much a revered institution instructing the public on policy issues, but a Court subject to reward or punishment at the (public opinion) polls in response to its policy decisions, much like the other branches of government.

These are intriguing results that suggest a number of interesting questions. Indeed, Hoekstra might have done more to suggest extension to her research and explore the consequences of her findings. Who, other than residents of local communities, might be susceptible to opinion effects? Other aware groups, such as issue publics, may be even less open to attitude persuasion. She finds some evidence that those who pay more attention to politics are more likely to shift their attitudes in the direction of the Court's ruling, while more educated individuals are less susceptible to persuasion. What other individual and contextual factors might mediate this relationship? Finally, how consequential are the effects uncovered here, even where public reaction was strongest (Court support)? On the one hand, if only the community from which a case originates reacts, the effect may be considered limited, even unimportant. On the other hand, every case begins somewhere, and other groups also may have sufficient awareness and interest to reevaluate the Court in light of its rulings, raising the possibility of an important additive effect over multiple decisions. While Hoekstra shows that highly aggregated data can obscure real effects, it remains unclear how widespread and consequential the Court's impact on public opinion may be.

Hoekstra should be commended for her clever and revealing approach to discerning the contours of public responsiveness to Court decisions. Clearly, as she suggests, the connections between the high court and the public are complicated, tenuous, and contingent. They are also quite important, and worthy of this interesting and insightful book.