More on the Supreme Court

  A comment on my last post noted that the Harris Poll question saying the Supreme Court had decided "that the police could not question a criminal unless he had a lawyer with him" was a mischaracterization--the decision just said that the police had to inform suspects of their right to have a lawyer present--and suggested that support might have been higher if the description had been accurate (saying "suspect" rather than "criminal" might also have made a difference).  Shortly after the decision, the Gallup Poll asked "have you heard or read about the recent US Supreme Court decision about confessions by persons charged with a crime."  If the respondent said yes, they asked "do you think the Supreme Court's ruling is good or bad?"  Combining the two questions, the results were:

Hadn't heard:  58%

Good:              10%

Bad:                 19%

Not sure:          13%

The comparison with the Harris Poll (which found that 30% approved, 56% disapproved, and 14% weren't sure) illustrates some general issues with interpreting surveys.  You could argue that the Gallup results show that most people didn't really have an opinion on the Miranda decision--that most people who said they approved or disapproved in the Harris Poll were just giving an off-the-cuff response to the (inaccurate) description.  On the other hand, you could say that there may also have been people who had heard about it but forgotten, and just needed a hint to jog their memory.   Despite the differences, both surveys showed about the same ratio of negative to positive evaluations (almost 2:1):  that is, they both suggested a widespread perception that the court was "soft on crime."  You could imagine other questions that would tell you something about whether that perception could be changed--for example, what if you used a different description of the decision, or gave some background information, or asked people who said that they had heard of the decision what they thought that it said.  One of the reasons that candidates commission their own surveys is to investigate things like that.  The general point is that there's no definitive question that tells you what people "really think," and when you have several questions on a topic, you don't have to pick one as the best--they can all shed some light.   

My recent posts on the Supreme Court got me wondering about how perceptions of the court have changed.  Starting in 1986, a number of surveys, mostly by Gallup, have asked "do you think the Supreme Court has been too liberal, too conservative, or just about right" (with some minor variations in the introduction).  The figures gives the percent saying too liberal minus the percent saying too conservative:

The different colors indicate Democratic and Republican presidents.  There is a clear pattern in which people perceive the Court as too liberal when a Democrat is president and too conservative when a Republican is.  This "thermostatic" reaction has been noted for other issues, but it's surprising that it appears for the Supreme Court.  The last observation (September 2021) is an exception--despite a Democratic president, the perception of the court as conservative is even stronger than it was under Trump.  The absence of a general trend is also interesting--most informed observers would say that the court has been getting more conservative over the period.

The percent who saw the court as "too liberal" or "too conservative" shows a different pattern--a pretty steady increase, without much difference between Democratic and Republican administrations.  There isn't much change in the percent saying "about right," but the percent of "don't knows" has declined pretty steadily, from 15-20 percent in the 1980s to around 3 percent today.  This change presumably reflects a combination of rising partisan polarization and increased attention to the Supreme Court.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

One thing led to another

 This post started as a postscript to my previous one, on public opinion about the Supreme Court in the 1960s.  I gave figures from a 1966 Harris poll on opinions of six decisions, but they were based on people who had an opinion.   I thought there might be substantial numbers of "don't knows" for some of them, so I looked for the original data, which can be found in the Odum Institute data archive at the University of North Carolina.  So here they are:

"In 1954, the US Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to require Negro children to go to all-Negro or segregated schools.  Do you personally think that decision of the US Supreme Court was right or wrong?"  right 57%; wrong 32%; DK 11%.

The others were all of the form "Another decision of the US Supreme Court was to ____.  Do you personally ...".  Just giving the key text:

"rule that the State Department could not refuse to allow Communists from travelling abroad"  36%-39%-25%

"rule all Congressional Districts had to have an equal number of people in them so each person's vote would count equally"  56%-24%-20%

"rule that children could not be required to recite a prayer in school" 27%-65%-8%

"rule that the police could not question a criminal unless he had a lawyer with him" 30%-56%-14%

"rule that any refusal by a hotel, motel, or restaurant to serve a person because of their race was illegal" 56%-34%-20%

The survey also asked "all in all, how would you rate the job the US Supreme Court has done over the last 10 to 15 years--excellent, pretty good, only fair, or poor?"  Among those who had an opinion, 8% said excellent, 38% pretty good, 32% only fair, and 22% poor.  

My last post suggested that changes in approval of the Supreme Court might have reflected changes in the importance that people placed on different issues--in  particular, increased focus on crime, an area where the court's decisions were unpopular.  Since the data had an overall rating and measures of the approval of some specific decisions, I decided to use it to investigate this point.  Although it couldn't shed light on change, it could tell us something about how much the different decisions mattered to people.  I did this by regressing ratings on views of the decisions (counting don't know about a decision as an intermediate position).  I did this separately for college graduates and other people, because I suspected that there would be some difference between the groups.  The figure shows regression coefficients for the two groups (actually, the regression coefficients multiplied by 10).

The line represents equal values in the two groups--points above the line mean a decision counted more among college graduates.  Most points were above the line--this is what I expected, because opinions are usually more closely connected to each other among educated people.  The least popular decision--school prayer--was the least important among both college graduates and other people.  The relative importance was similar in both groups, with one major exception--the Miranda decision (right to a lawyer) was the most important among less educated people but only fifth among college graduates.  That decision was unusual in another way--there was little difference between approval among college graduates and less educated people.  On all the others, college graduates were substantially more likely to approve.  

In a previous post, I mentioned that a question in 1994 found overwhelming approval (88%) of the decision on segregated schools.  A survey in 2000 asked  about "the recent decision upholding 'Miranda Rules' requiring police to inform arrested suspects of their rights to remain silent and to have a lawyer present during any questioning? Do you generally agree or disagree with this decision?" and found that 86% approved and only 11% disapproved.   I think that there would also be overwhelming approval of the non-discrimination, equal population in districts, and school prayer decisions (school prayer still is controversial, but the decision referred to in 1966 involved public school teachers leading students in prayer during classroom hours).  Some of this change reflects a widespread liberal trend in opinions on "social issues".  But with the Miranda decision, I think that another factor was that it led to a standard procedure--police gave a "Miranda warning"--which made it easier for people to get used to it.  In contrast, the abortion ruling has led to confusion, as some states have new laws that don't make clear exceptions for cases in which there's overwhelming popular support for legal abortion, like the 10-year old rape victim in Ohio, some have conflicts between local and state governments, and some have controversies about reviving laws that were in force before Roe v. Wade.  So my prediction is that support for legal abortion will grow in the next few years.

The Supreme Court in the 1960s

In my last post, I discussed predictions that the Supreme Court would lose legitimacy because of public disapproval of the decision overturning Roe v. Wade.  I noted that ratings of the Supreme Court were favorable in 1963 and 1967, but then fell sharply from June 1967 to July 1968.  What might have caused this change?  I searched for contemporary survey questions about Supreme Court decisions.  In November 1966, the Harris Poll asked a series of questions--I give the percent approving, among those who had an opinion*:

School desegregation                                     64%

Equal numbers in Congressional districts:    76%

No right to refuse service because of race:    64%

Can't stop Communists from foreign travel:  49%

Right to attorney in police questioning:         35%

school prayer                                                  30%

In all of these cases, the court had ruled in what was considered a liberal direction.  Some of the rulings were popular with the public and others were unpopular.  

There were no questions about Supreme Court rulings between June 1967 and 1968.  Thurgood Marshall had been nominated just a few days before the 1967 survey, and the confirmation hearings took place in the following months.  There were no national survey questions about views of the Marshall nomination, but one from the Minnesota Poll found overwhelming approval in that state.  My guess is that it didn't make much difference--the people who disapproved of him who already had a negative view of the court because of civil rights ruling.  

So maybe the change wasn't because of what the Supreme Court did over that period, but because of other things in the world.  1967 was the "long hot summer" of urban riots--most of them, including the ones in Detroit and Newark, took place after the 1967 survey.  There were more riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968.  In July 1968, another Harris Poll asked people if they agreed or disagreed with several statements about the Supreme Court.  For "The present court has been good in the desegregation and one man-one vote decisions,"  41% agreed, 25% disagreed, and 34% weren't sure.  For "The present court made it harder to convict criminals and was wrong to ban prayers from schoolrooms," 78% agreed, 11% disagreed, and 11% weren't sure.  So the events of 1967-68 may have increased the salience of issues about crime, on which most people disapproved of the court decisions.  In June 1968, Gallup asked about whether people would like new members of the Supreme Court to have liberal or conservative views:  51% said conservative and 30% said liberal, although the number of self-described liberals and conservatives was about equal at that time.  As I mentioned last time, views of the Supreme Court eventually recovered--that was partly because the Court became more conservative, and partly because the public came to accept some decisions that had initially been unpopular (most aspects of the Miranda ruling).

*I would have liked to include don't knows, but they weren't given in the source.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

PS:  here's a short piece I wrote with Andrew Gelman that was published earlier this week: https://www.smerconish.com/exclusive-content/how-abortion-became-one-of-the-most-polarizing-issues-in-america

Losing legitimacy?

 Since the Dobbs decision, I have seen many claims that it has (or will) cause the Supreme Court to lose legitimacy (here is one example).  It does appear that most people did not want the court to overturn Roe v. Wade, but this is not the first unpopular decision (and almost certainly not the most unpopular).  That raises the question of why this particular decision should have a lasting effect.  It seems like a reasonable model to start with would be that decisions affect views of the court based on a combination of popularity and prominence, but that the impact declines over time as memories fade and people get used to the new situation (which is almost never as bad as critics of the decision predicted it would be).  On the other hand, there may be some decisions that have a lasting impact, maybe because they have unexpected consequences that keep them in the news (for example, if state differences in laws on abortion lead to disputes between states that produce more cases for the Court) or just because they seem so unfair to a substantial part of the public (the case that decided the 2000 election might be an example).  

According to the Gallup Poll, confidence in the Supreme Court has generally declined since the 1970s--see this post and the latest update from Gallup.  But there has been a decline in confidence in many institutions, so it's hard to say what part of that is unique to the Supreme Court.  So I looked for data going farther back, and found one from Gallup that was asked six times from 1963 to 1987:  "In general, what kind of a rating would you give the Supreme Court:  excellent, good, fair, or poor."  You could say that "confidence" gets at something deeper than "rating," but I think that most people don't  make much distinction, so that they are reasonably good substitutes.  What makes this question useful, aside from the general benefit of extending the period for which data are available, is that there were a lot of important decisions in the 1960s.

The average rating was lower in the middle (1968, 1969, and 1973) and then bounced back.  An interesting point is that there was less dispersion in 1986 and 1987 than there had been in 1963 and 1967--fewer "excellents" and fewer "poors".  There was a sharp decline in average confidence  between June 1967 and June 1968.  In my next post, I will try to find evidence, or at least hints, about what might have caused that.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]