The Costs of Court Curbing: Evidence from the United States

Amanda Driscoll; Michael J. Nelson

The Costs of Court Curbing: Evidence from the United States

Canonical models of interbranch relations assume that incumbents undermine well-respected courts at their own peril. Although court-curbing proposals are frequent in diverse political and institutional contexts, there have been few efforts to examine the electoral costs of interbranch aggression. Drawing upon vignette and conjoint experiments, we find some evidence that the public will punish incumbents for attacks on courts. However, the size of the effect varies: it is largest among individuals who hold the court in high esteem and can be mitigated by copartisanship with the proposer. Moreover, once information about partisanship and issue positions is available to respondents, the effect of supporting court curbing is smaller than other considerations. These results have implications for the public’s willingness to safeguard the institutional separation of powers via the electoral connection and suggest that politicians may engage in activities that erode democracy without a broad loss of public support.

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Metadata

Work Title	The Costs of Court Curbing: Evidence from the United States
Access	Open Access
Creators	Amanda Driscoll Michael J. Nelson
Keyword	Separation of powers Legitimacy Court curbing Interbranch conflict
License	CC BY-NC 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial)
Work Type	Article
Publisher	The Journal of Politics
Publication Date	March 23, 2023
Publisher Identifier (DOI)	https://doi.org/10.1086/723021
Deposited	February 19, 2024

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The Costs of Court Curbing: Evidence from the United States

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View: ACCESSIBLE_VERSION_DriscollNelson_Curbing_2021_JOP Final.pdf

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The Costs of Court Curbing: Evidence from the United States

Files

View: ACCESSIBLE_VERSION_DriscollNelson_Curbing_2021_JOP Final.pdf

Metadata

Versions

Analytics

Collections

Work History

Version 1 published

Version 2 published

Version 3 published

Version 1
published

Version 2
published

Version 3
published