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.