Devolving Dobbs: Abortion Politics and the Legitimacy of State High Courts

Scholars have come to understand that the state supreme courts play a vital role in American politics, a conclusion driven home by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that abortion rights must be fought out in the individual states. At the same time, little research has ever focused on how the mass publics in the states view their high courts, and especially on whether people are willing to extend those institutions legitimacy. Our purpose in this article is to first introduce new measures of the institutional legitimacy of the 50-state supreme courts (based on representative samples in each state) as of the close of 2023. After validating the measure, we present the results of 50 experiments (one in each state) concerning how an abortion-rights ruling, whether liked or disliked, might affect attitudes toward the state high courts. Informed by a theory of attitude updating, we find that specific support attitudes do get altered, but diffuse support attitudes do not. Finally, we consider the question of how the Dobbs context might be replicated in the American states, concluding that the state high courts are unlikely to make counter-majoritarian rulings.