Abstract
One of the more important innovations in the study of how citizens assess the U.S. Supreme Court is the ideological updating model, which assumes that citizens grant legitimacy to the institution according to the perceived distance between themselves and the Court on a unidimensional ideological (liberal–conservative) continuum. Under this model, citizens are also said to update this calculation with every new salient Supreme Court decision. The model’s requirements, however, do not seem to square with the long-established view that Americans are largely innocent of ideology. Here, we conduct an audit of the model’s mechanisms using a series of empirical tests applied to a nationally representative sample. Our general conclusion is that the ideological updating model, especially when supplemented with the requirement that citizens must become aware of Court decisions, simply does not square with the realities of American politics. Students of Supreme Court legitimacy may therefore want to search for other theories of legitimacy updating.
How do citizens update their views of the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court? This question has of late become interesting to legal scholars and social scientists, as researchers have expanded their focus on accounting for cross-sectional variability in legitimacy to address the question of legitimacy’s dynamics. This interest also reflects a concern for understanding how blockbuster decisions by the Court affect the public’s view of the institution.
The implicit model of political communication used in much of this research is quite simple. The updating process begins with the Supreme Court making a decision. Citizens learn about the decision via the mass media and perhaps via elites and interest groups as well. In turn, they compare their understanding of the ruling with their own preferences on the public policy issue at stake in the litigation. Then, they update their views of the legitimacy of the Court as an institution. In this sense, assessments of the performance of the institution (specific support) are thought to influence willingness to grant legitimacy to the institution (diffuse support). The implication of this model is that citizen support for the Court is frequently changing, as people learn about new rulings by the justices.
At the same time, there can be little debate over the proposition that most Supreme Court decisions have no effect on the Court’s legitimacy because the mass public never learns that the Court has ruled. Much of the Court’s work is conducted outside the glare of public opinion. To most people, most Supreme Court rulings pass by unnoticed.
Blockbuster cases may be an exception. Indeed, several notable papers have directed their attention to the Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), under the assumption that the ruling on the Act was salient and important to the American people, and therefore that the litigation can serve as a “limiting case” for purposes of theory testing. 1 These studies are significant, in part because they conclude that the Court’s ruling on this case affected its institutional legitimacy.
Scholars have recently considerably complicated this simple understanding with what is termed the ideological updating model. For example, rather than focusing on simple policy agreement and disagreement, both Bartels and Johnston (2013) and Christenson and Glick (2015) introduce “ideological satisfaction/dissatisfaction” as the main driver of change in institutional support (see also Jessee & Malhotra, 2013; Johnston, Hillygus, & Bartels, 2014; Malhotra & Jessee, 2014). Referring to the Court’s decision on the ACA, Christenson and Glick (2015) conclude that “the decision provides new information that people can use to update their assessments of the Court’s ideology, and that these updates affect assessments of legitimacy” (p. 415). More specifically, [p]eople who moved the Court closer to themselves in ideological space after observing its most salient decision in years increased their legitimacy scores for it, whereas people who learned the Court’s ideology was less aligned with their own saw it as less legitimate than before the decision. (Christenson & Glick, 2015, p. 410)
Thus, in this new model, Court rulings are mainly useful for providing updated information about the ideological location of the Court. As Johnston et al. (2014) conclude from their analysis of the effects of the Court’s decision in the ACA, “. . . our results strongly support an ideological foundation to Supreme Court legitimacy in the mass public” (p. 972).
This ideological model of evaluation places great demands on the American people. One must have an ideology, perceive the Court in ideological terms and understand its ideological location, judge policies by ideological criteria, hold attitudes toward the institution, and update those attitudes continuously. Moreover, this process seems especially difficult and confusing in a context in which the Court’s decisions are roughly one-half conservative and one-half liberal (Bartels & Johnston, 2013). It may well be that scholars evaluate the Supreme Court according to this model, but to assume that ordinary people do so runs deeply counter to a long tradition in political science suggesting that Americans are largely “innocent of ideology” (Converse, 1964).
Indeed, every model of updating attitudes toward the Supreme Court—not just the ideological updating model—makes a number of heroic assumptions that few students of political communication would accept. Althaus et al. (2011), for example, are particularly critical of such simplistic models, complaining that “political science scholarship that touches on public opinion processes often assumes that social, political, and economic facts are routinely transmitted to the mass public, presumably through mainstream media channels” (p. 1065). According to these authors, that is not so: The importance of studying and describing these information flows is little appreciated within our field. Their continued neglect calls into question a wide range of theories about system- and individual-level processes rooted in the unlikely assumption that the observable facts serving as inputs to our models are communicated widely enough through a political system that they could serve as a proximal influence on individual-level opinions. (Althaus et al., 2011, p. 1077, emphasis added)
Even those who argue that Court decisions provide “new information that people can use to update their assessments of the Court’s ideology, and that these updates affect assessments of legitimacy” (Christenson & Glick, 2015, p. 415) are quite candid in acknowledging that . . . real events of this nature are rare and even when they do happen, few people are naturally exposed to the details. All of this suggests that while seeing the Court in a strategic and political light can undermine legitimacy, this mechanism is rarely actually activated, which further contributes to stability [in the Court’s institutional legitimacy]. (Christenson & Glick, 2015, p. 416)
Perhaps as a result of the demands the ideological updating model makes on ordinary people, extant research has produced some confused and confusing findings. Most notably, Malhotra and Jessee (2014) discover, Whereas ideological distance strongly predicts approval of and trust in the Court, with those holding ideological positions closest to the Court being the most supportive of it, the relationship between ideology and perceptions of the legitimacy of the Court’s role in protecting minority rights are reversed. (p. 842, emphasis added)
This finding is directly contrary to that of Bartels and Johnston and Christenson and Glick, although, to be sure, the measure of legitimacy used by Malhotra and Jessee is not identical to that used in many of the relevant studies. And while Gibson and Nelson (2015) acknowledge that ideological distance is associated with specific support for the Court, they find little if any connection between ideological distance and institutional support. Thus, it seems fair to conclude that both extant theory and empirical findings are in a bit of a state of disarray.
Our purpose in this article is specifically to investigate the mechanisms of the ideological updating model, with an eye toward determining whether the American people are capable of updating their views of the Supreme Court via the process envisaged by advocates of this new ideologically grounded model. We do so in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the ACA. 2 We ask, for instance, to what degree are the basics of Court–citizen communication met; how common is it for citizens to learn of important Supreme Court rulings and to understand, even in general terms, what the Court decided? Most importantly, to what degree does the frame of ideology guide citizens in calculating how much legitimacy to give the Supreme Court?
To investigate the micro-level mechanisms that undergird the updating model, we utilize a nationally representative Internet panel survey, The American Panel Survey (TAPS). Our overall conclusion is that a remarkable chunk of the American people cannot update their views of the Court in the presumed fashion. In the end, we suggest that the “rule, learn, update” model of change in Supreme Court attitudes is much too demanding of many, if not most, of the American people and therefore that it can claim only limited empirical support for its basic assumptions about the mechanisms involved in updating attitudes toward the Supreme Court. For many Americans, willingness to extend legitimacy to the Court has little to do with ideology.
The Micro-Mechanics of the Ideological Updating Model
There are quite a number of moving parts in this ideological updating model, especially in contrast to a simple policy agreement/disagreement model. In the latter, citizens are thought to perceive a ruling and determine whether they agree or disagree with it by comparing the Court’s policy with the citizen’s own policy preference. This is a classic “running tally” mechanism of specific support (Gibson & Nelson, 2015). Depending on the body of decisions to which the citizen pays attention, this tally may bounce around a bit. This is the measure that the New York Times and others have observed when they write about the Court losing the support of its constituents (e.g., Liptak, 2011).
In contrast, the ideological model requires a complicated process of encoding decisions and using them to recalculate the Court’s ideological position. 3 These categorizations can often be difficult: How, for instance, should one code a decision that allows local governments to take private property from citizens (often poor citizens because the taking is done within the context of a redevelopment policy) and give that property to private developers for projects such as shopping malls (e.g., Kelo v. City of New London, 2005)? Citizens no doubt have difficulty with this encoding process, often winding up with idiosyncratic and highly variable characterizations of the same Court decision. 4
And what of moderates, who make up a substantial proportion of the American electorate? It is difficult to know what a “moderate” Supreme Court decision is. Perhaps moderates are displeased by both liberal and conservative Court decisions. It is also unclear how much dynamic force is available for this model in contemporary American politics, inasmuch as the Court is currently almost evenly split between making liberal and conservative decisions (Bartels & Johnston, 2013; Bartels, Johnston, & Mark, 2015).
Moreover, not everyone organizes her or his policy preferences in the assumed common ideological space—It is not obvious where, for instance, libertarians fit on the traditional liberal–conservative continuum. And, even if people can locate themselves, not everyone is capable of locating the Court in that space. 5 There are, no doubt, citizens who reject altogether the characterization of Court decisions as ideological, instead believing that the Court makes its decisions on the basis of what the law commands in individual cases. 6 One also wonders how informative citizens find a single decision when trying to estimate the ideological location of the Court. And, are all decisions weighted equally? Furthermore, it seems unlikely that judgments of the Court’s legitimacy are based exclusively on ideological distance, without regard to process considerations and a host of other factors (Gibson & Nelson, 2015; Nelson & Gibson, 2017). Thus, current research on legitimacy updating seems to rely upon an unrealistically complicated and incomplete model of public opinion.
More generally, the ideological framework of this model seems challenged by an extensive body of research on public opinion concluding that many Americans are largely innocent of ideology (Converse, 1964). According to Converse, most citizens are not politically sophisticated; they do not conceptualize politics through the lens of ideology, and are frequently unable to interpret the socio-political implications of ideological concepts. 7
In addition, many key aspects of the ideological story remain unresolved, such as whether ideology can be appropriately captured in a unidimensional model (Feldman & Johnston, 2014). Many ordinary citizens, it seems, maintain multidimensional ideological structures (e.g., Carmines, Ensley, & Wagner, 2012b; Ellis & Stimson, 2009). For example, citizens may think of themselves as ideologically conservative on an economic dimension, while liberal along a social dimension. When forced to place themselves on a singular ideological continuum, these citizens are likely “to self-identify as moderate (or say ‘don’t know’) in response to the standard liberal-conservative scale” (Treier & Hillygus, 2009, p. 680).
8
The lessons that Treier and Hillygus (2009) draw about voting behavior most likely apply with equal force to perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court: Our results show that failing to account for the multidimensional nature of ideological preferences can produce inaccurate predictions of voting behavior for the plurality of Americans who do not call themselves liberal or conservative. As such, we recommend that future research use distinct measures of social and economic preferences in empirical models of mass behavior. (pp. 697-698)
Generally, in studies on ideology among the American people, it is hard to find evidence to support the assumption that citizens are sufficiently adept at using ideological criteria to evaluate the Supreme Court’s legitimacy—as the ideological updating model suggests.
Summary
As Johnston et al. (2014) describe this ideological updating model, . . . we argue that the impact of the [Court’s Affordable Care Act] decision for any given citizen is conditional on three factors: (1) a citizen’s awareness of the decision and its ideological direction; (2) the decision’s influence on that citizen’s beliefs about the ideology of the Court more broadly; and (3) the ideological orientation of the citizen herself. Our results strongly support an ideological foundation to public opinion of Supreme Court legitimacy. (p. 964)
Our purpose in this article is to investigate each step in this communication process. First, do citizens think in ideological terms and are they able to locate themselves on a unidimensional liberal–conservative continuum? Second, can citizens locate the Supreme Court on this ideological continuum? Third, do citizens hold opinions on the general issues that the Supreme Court decides? Fourth, do citizens know that the Supreme Court has ruled on the issue and comprehend the Court’s decision? Fifth, can citizens match their policy preferences and the Court’s policy ruling to the unidimensional ideological continuum on which they place themselves? Sixth, do citizens hold views about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court? Finally, a dynamic updating model actually requires that a citizen be able to do all of these things at least twice (if not continuously)—before the Court’s ruling on a salient case and after the Court’s ruling. Generally, we seek to estimate the proportion of the American people that can reasonably be said to satisfy the various requirements of the ideological updating model. To reiterate, we do so owing to the crucial role that this model has achieved in the context of testing legitimacy theory.
The Survey Data
We base our analysis on data from TAPS, a monthly online survey, modeled on the KN KnowledgePanel. Panelists were first recruited as a national probability sample with an address-based sampling frame in the fall of 2011 by Knowledge Networks as part of TAPS, a publicly available survey conducted by the Weidenbaum Center at Washington University. Individuals without Internet access were provided a laptop and Internet service at the expense of the Weidenbaum Center. 9 More technical information about the survey is available at taps.wustl.edu.
In our empirical analysis, we focus on TAPS respondents from three adjacent waves conducted around the Supreme Court ruling on the ACA on June 28, 2012. The surveys were fielded in May (Wave 1: 1,511 respondents 10 ), June (Wave 2: 1,475 respondents), and July (Wave 3: 1,458 respondents). 11 To guarantee that all analyses are based on the same people, we restrict our study to the 1,363 respondents who answered all three waves.
Although commonly used in studies with panel data, this empirical strategy raises concerns about attrition. We address this issue in Online Appendix A, which demonstrates that nonrespondents in Wave 3 (July) do not differ in any substantively relevant way from those Wave 1 panelists who responded in Wave 3.
Analytical Strategy
The empirical objective of this article is to determine whether the assumptions of the ideological updating model square with the attributes of the American people. We therefore use the TAPS data to determine the percentage of the sample able to satisfy each of the model’s requirements. In the end, we cumulate these results so as to be able to draw an overall conclusion about the utility of the model. Following Johnston et al. (2014), we also take one additional step to try to determine the types of respondents able to perform ideological updating, using (loosely) the elaboration likelihood model (see Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
Standards for Assessing the Empirical Evidence
We have no doubt that readers will assess our findings about how widespread ideological is or can be by using their own expectations and standards, and therefore, conclusions about our evidence may be to some degree arbitrary (just as were conclusions about the percentages that Converse reported). Beyond these judgments, however, we offer several criteria by which one might judge the significance of our findings.
We understand the ideological model as a dynamic model of a temporal sequence that is composed of two parts. First is the “pretreatment” ideological position of the citizen. Citizens are assumed to know whether they are liberals or conservatives, and ideological self-identification is assumed to be relatively fixed and resistant to change, at least in the short term. 12 Court decisions do not change the ideological self-identification of the citizen.
Second is the “treatment”—a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. Decisions provide the dynamic force to the model in that any given ruling can attract the attention of the citizen, and any given ruling can be informative as to the ideological location of the Court. Decisions that are informative are used to update one’s preexisting assessment of whether the Supreme Court is liberal or conservative. After the update, satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the institution is recalculated based on the change in ideological proximity. 13 Increased dissatisfaction leads to the withdrawal of support from the institution; increased satisfaction bolsters and enhances institutional support. Thus, the two components of the model are the relatively fixed ideological predispositions of the citizens and the relatively fluid assessments of Supreme Court decisions.
In this fashion, there are elements of the updating model that are unique to ideological updating and elements that are common to every model of updating (i.e., including a simple running tally model). Regarding the former, without the ability to locating oneself on the liberal–conservative ideological continuum, no ideological updating is possible. Regarding the latter, without awareness that the Supreme Court has ruled on an issue, there can be no updating of any sort, ideological or policy-based included. We want to be careful in our analysis to ascertain which components of updating are unique to the ideological model and which, while necessary to the ideological model, are necessary to virtually all updating models. Thus, the reader will be able to see clearly the “marginal cost” of moving beyond a simple policy-based model to an ideology-based model.
A second way to assess our findings is to consider their implications for legitimacy theory, and especially for the revisionist view that Supreme Court legitimacy is significantly dependent upon public reactions to its decisions. Although the central purpose of this article is to investigate ideological updating as a theoretical/empirical problem, in Online Appendix B we treat the issue as “merely” a matter of missing data, and conclude that the ideological updating model results in losing about one-half of the cases to missing data.
We also treat the inability to engage in ideological updating as a measurement error problem, and assess the implications of the error for the likely constraints on the correlation of diffuse and specific support. We pursue this matter to be able to tie the findings of this article back to the substantive issue from which it arose. Online Appendix C reports the results of this analysis. Our findings on ideological updating can be easily fitted into the simulation reported in Online Appendix C; they show that the inability of a substantial proportion of Americans to engage in ideological updating sets a very low limit on the maximum possible correlation between specific and diffuse support.
Thus, at least three standards for evaluating our conclusions exist: (a) the preexisting expectations and standards of readers, (b) a comparison with a base model of policy updating, and (c) an assessment based on the implications for the substantive legitimacy model.
Testing the Model’s Assumptions
We begin our analysis with our bottom-line results. Table 1 reports the outcomes of each test of the components of the ideological updating model and the cumulative “pass” rate, under two different conditions. Our motivation for introducing the analysis with our conclusions is to focus attention on the cumulative effect of the failure to pass the various requirements of the model. As the data in Table 1 make clear, the percentage of the sample unable to meet any given requirement may not be judged to be particularly large. However, the cumulative effect across all of the requirements is substantial. If we assume that it is irrelevant whether the “rule, learn, update” model posits that citizens accurately learn of the content of the Court’s opinion, then about one-half of the respondents satisfy the requirements of the model. If we impose the additional requirement that citizens must learn accurately what the Court has ruled, then the percentage declines to less than a majority of the American people—43.7%. These percentages strike us as large enough to be quite consequential for the updating model. However, we all know where the Devil lives—Before we discuss the implications of these figures in detail, we must explicate precisely how we arrived at these numbers.
Table 1. Summary of the Tests of the Micro-Level Rule, Learn, Update Model.
The percentages are based on the 1,334 respondents who answered all three waves of the TAPS survey and sum to 100% across columns (except for rounding errors). The data are weighted by poststratification May weights with Internet adjustment. The numbers of respondents are shown in parentheses. After each criterion, the source (month) of the TAPS survey is shown. The May survey was conducted before the decision, and the July survey after the Court ruled. TAPS = The American Panel Survey, Washington University in St. Louis.
The Basics of Ideological Distance
The first empirical question we must consider is whether the respondents in our sample are able to identify their own location on a unidimensional liberal–conservative continuum. The TAPS panelists were asked, “In terms of your political views, do you think of yourself as very liberal, liberal, slightly liberal, moderate, slightly conservative, conservative, or very conservative?”
Recall that in the American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys, somewhere around 20+ percent of the respondents refuse to accept this continuum (Carmines, Ensley, & Wagner, 2012a). In the TAPS data, however, the figure is only 8.9%, which includes 8.7% of the respondents who said they did not know their own ideology and 0.3% who refused to answer the question. 14
The respondents were also asked to specify where the U.S. Supreme Court is located on this ideological continuum: “Where would you place each of the following on this liberal–conservative scale? [the majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court].” 15 Nearly 21% of the respondents were unable to score the Court on this ideological continuum. 16
Moreover, the requirement of jointly locating oneself and the Court on a common unidimensional continuum cannot be satisfied for 24.3% of the sample. We take this percentage as uniquely attributable to the “ideological” part of the ideological updating model. As we have noted, failures associated with knowing about Court rulings are common to all models of updating. But about a quarter of the American people cannot engage in ideological updating because they cannot place themselves and the Court on a common ideological continuum.
Policy Opinionation
The TAPS data reveal that not all Americans held a view on the ACA. When asked, “As you may know, the health care bill enacted in 2010 includes a requirement that every American must buy health insurance or pay a fine. Do you approve or disapprove of the requirement that every American must buy health insurance or pay a fine?” 14.5% of the sample was unable to offer an opinion. If respondents hold no view on an issue before the Supreme Court, it does not seem that a Court ruling on that issue can affect their judgments of the institution, one way or the other. We acknowledge that this requirement is universal to any updating model.
Mapping Policy Preferences Onto the Liberal–Conservative Continuum
The ideological updating model implicitly assumes that people can readily understand whether a Supreme Court decision is liberal or conservative. After encoding the Court’s new policy decisions, people should be able to reassess the ideological location of the Court. Most would likely assume that a decision in favor of government-sponsored health care is a liberal decision. 17 So, the model assumes that a conservative would understand the Court’s ruling as a liberal decision, would therefore conclude that the Court has become a more liberal institution, 18 then recalculate the distance between herself and the institution, and adjust legitimacy accordingly.
TAPS did not ask the respondents whether the ACA ruling was a liberal or conservative decision, so no direct means of assessing the model’s fit with public views of the decision is available. Even though it has no implications for our quantitative audit of the model, it is possible, however, to determine how well the issue of health care fits with the ideological predispositions of people. Figure 1 provides the data necessary to assess this possibility. Because a nontrivial number of respondents was unable to form a view on government-mandated health care (as we have noted), the percentage of people supporting the law is not the mirror obverse of the percentage opposing the law. We therefore report both support and opposition in Figure 1.
Attitudes toward government-mandated health care by respondent’s ideology.
The data reveal that those who are “very conservative” fit the ideological updating model quite well, with nearly all of these people opposing the mandate. At the opposite extreme, however, the model seems to breakdown among those who are “very liberal” inasmuch as the percentages supporting and opposing the law are roughly the same. Across the three degrees of liberalism, more than one third of the respondents oppose the government mandate. Generally, there is a considerable asymmetry in how health care maps onto ideology; conservatives seem to understand the law as a liberal law, but liberals are confused as to the ideological tenor of the policy. 19
The ideological updating model seems to assume that Court decisions are readily encoded by the American people. However, perhaps the model does not really require that Court decisions be accurately understood. 20 Because the model does not actually examine how decisions are encoded—instead, it simply asks the respondents where the Court stands before the decision and where it stands after the decision—it is possible that ideological dissatisfaction with the Court among liberals grew as a result of the Court’s decision on the ACA. Regrettably, we know very little about how people reach their judgments about the location (and relocation) of the Court on the liberal–conservative ideological continuum.
In our audit of how well the ideological updating model fits with the American people, we score no respondents as unable to encode the decision. If the respondent has an ideological identity, and if he or she has a preference on government-sponsored health care, we assume some sort of updating can take place. Apart from our audit, however, we remain skeptical about a model that places no reality constraints on how citizens view and judge individual Court decisions.
The Court Decision as the Causal Agent
If we apply three simple criteria to the respondents—that they are able to locate themselves and the Court on the liberal–conservative continuum and that they hold an opinion on health care—we find that 33.4% of the sample does not meet the requirements of the ideological updating model. It remains to determine, however, whether the requirement that one knows how the Court ruled on the case is widely satisfied.
As we noted already, some public opinion scholars are reluctant to assume that the facts of political life readily penetrate the consciousness of the American people. This same skepticism can be applied to Supreme Court pronouncements, even on issues that should be highly salient. Thus, the next portion of our analysis asks whether the American people were aware of the Court’s decision and understood its policy position.
TAPS asked the respondents: The Supreme Court ruled on whether it is constitutional to require Americans to have health insurance. Do you know how the Court ruled on that issue? [For those who answered yes] According to the Supreme Court, is the requirement that Americans have health insurance or pay a penalty constitutional or unconstitutional?
These two questions, although slightly awkward in their format, allow us to derive two figures: the percentage of the sample aware that the Court had ruled on the issue and the percentage that correctly understood that the Court had ruled the law constitutional.
We derived our estimate of knowledge that the Court had ruled by comparing those who said they did not know the Court had ruled and those who claimed to know “how the Court ruled on that issue,” yet were unable to answer the follow-up question on the nature of the Court’s ruling. From these two questions, we determined that about one third of the respondents (33.8%) were unaware that the Court had ruled in the case. This is not surprising inasmuch as public opinion research routinely reports widespread inattentiveness to even the most dramatic political events (e.g., Althaus, 2008).
The follow-up question asked the respondents how the Court ruled in the case. A total of 56.9% of the sample—which includes those unaware that the Court had ruled in the denominator—correctly asserted that the Court found the mandate constitutional; 43.1% did not. 21
The implications of the accuracy of knowledge about a Supreme Court decision for the updating model are slightly clouded. One might assume that knowledge must be accurate (the Court found the ACA constitutional) for the ideological model to apply, or one might relax entirely any requirement of accuracy under the assumption that what people believe is more important for assessing the institution than what may be in fact true. 22 In our final assessment of the updating model, we provide conclusions with and without any assumptions about the accuracy of citizen perceptions of the ruling.
Holding Views on the Supreme Court’s Legitimacy
Crucial to the ideological updating model is the dependent variable—institutional support for the U.S. Supreme Court. The indicators of support are typically asked with a Likert-type response set that includes some sort of center category (such as “uncertain” or “neither agree nor disagree”). Because that center category can be scored on an ordinal/interval response scale, those giving these “don’t know” responses do not get excluded from the resulting index of support.
It turns out, however, that 7.5% of the respondents provided a “don’t know” answer to all six of the indicators of diffuse support. 23 From the point-of-view of all updating models, these folks seem to have no attitude to update—They have no substantive views toward the Supreme Court’s legitimacy, one way or the other. Without an opinion to update, it is difficult to see how the ideological updating model can apply.
Summing Up
The foregoing analysis has reported what are essentially a series of bivariate tests of the updating model. Obviously, one cannot assume that each test is independent of the others, so that the percentages passing or failing the tests can be easily summed. We therefore present the results of each test and the cumulative “pass” rate, under two different conditions, in Table 1.
The two cumulative rates reported in Table 1 pertain to whether or not the model is assumed to require accuracy in perceptions of the Supreme Court’s opinion. If we assume that it is irrelevant whether the “rule, learn, update” model posits that citizens accurately learn of the content of the Court’s opinion, then about one-half of the respondents satisfy the requirements of the model. If we impose the requirement that citizens must learn accurately what the Court has ruled, then the percentage declines to 43.7%.
We reiterate that roughly one-half of the model failures can be uniquely attributed to the ideological component of the model, with the other half being common to every model requiring citizens to update their legitimacy views on the basis of rulings by the Court. In some sense, the ideological updating model takes a model that is demanding in the first place, and roughly doubles the demands it makes of the American people.
We readily acknowledge that our findings could well be issue specific. Despite what some researchers have claimed, the ACA is in some ways a difficult policy. For instance, some liberals oppose the law because it does not go far enough. Furthermore, the initial announcement of the ruling was botched a bit by the media, even if only for a fairly short period of time. 24 The winning coalition was unexpected and confusing because one of the most far right-wing justices voted to uphold the legislation. Discussions of the grounds of the decision (“no” on interstate commerce, “yes” on taxation) may have confused some people. Indeed, perhaps the effects of Supreme Court decisions are curvilinear, with cases that generate too much information winding up being just about as confusing for the mass public as cases generating too little information. Perhaps this case is not as ideal for testing the ideological updating model as some authors claim. On the contrary, of course, government-sponsored health care has been one of the most salient and polarizing issues in American politics.
Nevertheless, scholars likely chose the ACA case for analysis owing to both the substantive importance of the issue under litigation and the extraordinary salience of the constitutional challenge to Obamacare. Consequently, we anticipate that advocates of the ideological updating model will find these findings sobering. If the model’s assumptions are so poorly met for the ACA ruling, one wonders what proportion of Court decisions would generate a better fit. And, to reiterate, virtually no Court ruling would be salient enough to overcome the deficit created by the failure of about a quarter of the American public to think of themselves and the Court in ideological terms.
The Attributes of Those Capable of Updating Their Views
Finally, we know from decades of research that not all citizens are able to update their views. According to the elaboration likelihood model (e.g., Zaller, 1992), two conditions are necessary for attitudes to change. First, there must be exposure to an exogenous factor—in this case, a ruling by the Supreme Court. Second, the attitudes under consideration must be pliable. The problem for attitude change is that those with the most malleable attitudes are those least likely to be attentive to the rulings of the Supreme Court. This in turn has given rise to the conventional curvilinear hypothesis that change is most likely in the Goldilocks zone—those who have a moderate level of attentiveness and moderately malleable attitudes—and that change in attitudes is unlikely at the two extremes. This is the hypothesis that Johnston et al. (2014) tested in the context of the ACA litigation.
As the final step in investigating the plausibility of the ideological updating model, we consider the percentage of those passing these earlier tests on ideology and awareness that are likely to be susceptible to attitude change. Our filtering of the data so far mainly addresses the lower end of the distribution—those unlikely to be exposed to a Court ruling. We therefore ask whether those passing all of these tests hold attitudes so entrenched that they are unlikely to change as a result of a Court decision. As a simple test, we consider the percentage of Court legitimacy responses for which the respondent gave a “strongly” reply—either “agree strongly” or “disagree strongly”—as an indicator of attitude crystallization and hence resistance to change.
Of the 50.8% of the sample passing all of the tests without an accuracy requirement, 6.5% issued six “strongly” answers to the Supreme Court measures and another 11.1% gave five “strongly” answers. Of the 43.7% also passing the accuracy test, 6.7% gave six “strongly” replies and 11.8% gave five such replies. Using the full-sample denominator, one might subtract from the summary figures reported in Table 1 another 8 or so percentage points, which, of course, lowers our estimate of the percentage of Americans capable of updating their views toward Supreme Court legitimacy to roughly four in 10. With the requirement that citizens must understand how the Court actually ruled, nearly two thirds of the American people seem to be disqualified from ideological updating because they are unaware of Court decisions, do not use the liberal–conservative ideological continuum, or hold such strong attitudes toward the Court that they are unlikely to be affected by Court decisions, one way or the other.
Discussion and Concluding Thoughts
In the end, our analysis relies on two fairly simple empirical assertions. A sizable proportion of the American populace is oblivious to Supreme Court rulings, even on seemingly crucial issues of public policy. Because they are not closely attentive to the Court’s decisions, their attitudes toward the institution do not wax and wane much with the institution’s policy outputs.
Second, and perhaps slightly more controversially, many Americans are ill prepared to use ideological concepts to judge the Court. Some seem not to accept and/or understand a unidimensional liberal/conservative ideological continuum; others may think in ideological terms but have difficulty mapping Court decisions (e.g., Kelo v. City of New London, 2005) onto this simple continuum.
We do not for a moment claim that none of the American people judge their Supreme Court on ideological grounds. Nor do we assert that citizens never update their views toward Supreme Court legitimacy; nor that legitimacy attitudes are impervious to exogenous events (such as confirmation campaigns—Gibson & Caldeira, 2009). Furthermore, we recognize that many Americans use ideological considerations when thinking about political institutions, even if their understanding of ideology is multidimensional and/or defined by relatively idiosyncratic principles (e.g., religious fundamentalism, which can cut across the conventional liberal/conservative dimension). Instead, we focus on what we consider to be the overly simplistic approach employed in earlier research based on the ideological updating model. Although one might quibble with any given methodological decision we have made in this analysis, the indisputable evidence is that a substantial proportion of the American people is not capable of satisfying the requirements of the ideological updating model. These findings present some significant challenges to the “rule, learn, update” theory of attitude change.
What we think is most wrong about the ideological updating model is ideology; ideological updating is a herculean task for a mass public that has often been described as largely bereft of ideology. A simpler way to understand this process is to take one step back in the model and to posit that citizens evaluate Court opinions, when they learn of them, in terms of whether they like the opinion or dislike it (a sort of a “likeability heuristic”). Some may use ideological criteria in this assessment process; others may use simple group benefits—“Is the opinion good for groups with which I identify?” (e.g., public unions). Still another group may do nothing more than take cues from respected opinion leaders—“Does the Church tell us that it is a good decision?” Because many modes of assessing and updating Supreme Court legitimacy are used, it is not surprising that the evidence for ideological updating is so weak and implausible. And, indeed, perhaps this is simply one more piece of the puzzle of how the U.S. Supreme Courts is able to maintain its quite remarkable reservoir of goodwill among the American people.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We greatly appreciate the support of Steve Smith and the Weidenbaum Center for this research. The authors acknowledge with appreciation the assistance of Adam Green on preparing this paper. The authors are also thankful for useful comments on the paper from Shanto Iyengar, Mike Zilis, and Jeff Yates.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Weidenbaum Center at Washington University in St. Louis.
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