DOI: 10.5061/dryad.m63xsj48k
title: Has the Supreme Court become just another political branch? Public perceptions of Court approval and legitimacy in a post-Dobbs world

description: Have perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court polarized, much like the rest
 of American politics? Because of the Court’s unique role, for many years
 it remained one of the few institutions respected by both Democrats and
 Republicans alike. But the Court’s dramatic shift to the right in recent
 years—highlighted by its Dobbs decision in 2022—potentially upends that
 logic. Using both 8 waves of panel data and 18 nationally representative
 surveys spanning two decades, we show that while there was little evidence
 of partisan polarization in earlier years, in 2022 and 2023, such patterns
 are clear in favorability, trust, legitimacy, and support for reform.
 Factors that used to protect the Court—like knowledge about it and support
 for key democratic values—no longer do so. The Court has also become more
 important to voters, and will likely remain a political flashpoint, with
 disquieting implications for the Court’s place in our polity.
description: # Has the Supreme Court become just another political branch? Public
 perceptions of Court approval and legitimacy in a post-*Dobbs* world
 ## Description of the data
 and file structure **Figure 1:** Data for Figure 1 comes from publicly
 available Gallup data: Supreme Court:
 Congress:
 Executive
 Branch: This
 figure can be replicated using the **Figure1_Gallup_Trust.R** script and
 the **Figure1_Gallup_Trust.csv** data. **Figure 2:** Data for Figure 2
 comes from a content analysis of *The New York Times* coverage of the U.S.
 Supreme Court. To produce those results, we used the *New York Times* API,
 we first downloaded the corpus of news articles from 1 January 2008 – 20
 June 2023 (the last date available at the time we performed our content
 analysis) that included the words “Supreme Court” as a keyword for the
 article. This proceeds in two steps. The API does not return the full text
 but does return the full-text URL, so we used the API to generate the set
 of URLs, and then used the URLs to scrape the full text of the articles.
 Finally, we randomly selected samples of 100 to check for false positives.
 After removing a large subset of articles concerning the Supreme Court of
 India, we were left with approximately 88-92 percent accuracy (i.e.,
 approximately 9 in 10 articles were actually about the U.S. Supreme
 Court). Given the large number of articles (8,497), the trends are either
 conservative or likely unaffected by the small portion of false positives.
 False negatives are extremely unlikely here: it is hard to imagine the
 Times writing many articles (or even any articles) about the Supreme Court
 without listing it as a keyword. In the body of the paper, we discussed
 various trends in coverage of the Court: coverage of key cases and
 controversies, ideological/partisan coverage, and discussion of the
 Court’s legitimacy. This figure can be replicated using the
 **Figure2_NYTimes_Content.R** script and the
 **Figure2_NYTimes_Coverage.csv** data. **Figures 3 & 4 and Table 1:**
 These figures and tables rely on Data from the AIOD Panel Study. The AIOD
 Panel Study is an ongoing survey of voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and
 Wisconsin. Subjects were first recruited to join the panel in late 2019
 and early 2020 via address- based sampling, and as such, this data is a
 random sample of voters in each state; we use post-stratification weights
 in our analyses to ensure our data are reflective of each state’s
 population. Throughout the study, panelists haven taken our surveys via a
 custom web portal hosted by the survey firm SSRS. To ensure that the
 survey does not miss important groups with low rates of Internet usage,
 especially those in more rural areas and those with less education,
 respondents are allowed to take the study via the telephone; 2.3 percent
 of the sample did so in the most recent wave (this figure has been
 relatively constant across time). Full details on the recruitment of these
 panelists, response rates, construction of our post-stratification
 weights, and so forth, please see reference number 60. Informed consent
 was obtained for all survey subjects included in this project. The data
 collection for the AIOD study, as well as the APPC data used later in the
 paper, was approved by the University of Pennsylvania Institutional Review
 Board. During the 2020 election, panelists were interviewed quite
 regularly—nearly every month. After Trump’s second impeachment trial in
 February 2021, AIOD reduced the frequency to one survey per quarter, and
 reduced the sample to approximately one-third of our original size. To
 avoid biasing the sample, when AIOD reduced the panel size, they did so by
 randomly sampling from our existing sample, hence the data are a random
 sample of a random sample. In the 2021 data used in the paper, respondents
 were interviewed between October 6th and 12th (replicate 1), November 3rd
 and 9th (replicate 2), and December 1st and 7th (replicate 3); the dates
 of the 2022 wave are provided in the body of the paper. Note that
 replicate 1 is the pre-leak replicate, replicate 2 is the post-leak
 replicate, and replicate 3 is the post-decision replicate. For more
 details on the methodology of the panel, see the Appendix of *Democracy
 Amid Crises* (2023). These figures can be replicated using the
 **Figure3_Specific_Support.R** and **Figure4_Importance_Nominations.R**
 scripts and the **Figure3a_SC_Favorability.csv**,
 **Figure3b_SC_Trust.csv**, and **Figure4_Importance_Nominations.csv** data
 files. This table can be replicated using the
 **Table1_Change_Legitimacy_Reform.R** script and
 **Table1_Change_Legitimacy_Reform.csv** data **Figures 5-7:** In our
 over-time analysis, we draw on surveys conducted by the Annenberg Public
 Policy Center (APPC) from 2005 to 2023. The 2005 study was conducted by
 Princeton Survey Research Associates International for APPC. The telephone
 survey polled 1,504 adults aged eighteen years and older and was conducted
 between March 16 and April 18, 2005. Later surveys were conducted as part
 of the APPC’s annual Constitution Day Surveys. These surveys were
 conducted as part of the SSRS omnibus sample, a national, dual-frame
 bilingual telephone survey. The SSRS Omnibus sample is designed to
 represent the adult U.S. population (including Hawaii and Alaska). SSRS
 Omnibus uses a fully-replicated, single-stage, random-digit-dialing (RDD)
 sample of landline telephone households, and randomly generated cell phone
 numbers. Sample telephone numbers are computer generated and loaded into
 on-line sample files accessed directly by the computer-assisted telephone
 interviewing (CATI) system. The 2022 APPC Constitution Day Telephone
 Survey was conducted for APPC via telephone (CATI) by SSRS, an independent
 research company. Interviews were conducted August 2 – August 13, 2022,
 among 1,113 U.S. adults, aged 18 and older. Respondents were drawn from a
 national probability sample in all 50 states. The dual frame sample
 included 889 cell phone respondents and 37 respondents who completed the
 survey in Spanish. Data were weighted to represent the target U.S. adult
 population. The adjusted margin of error for total respondents in the
 sample is +/-3.58% at the 95% confidence level. The\ response rate was
 3.0% (AAPOR RR 3). The 2023 APPC Online Survey was conducted for APPC via
 the SSRS Opinion Panel among U.S. adults ages 18 and older. Data
 collection was conducted from May 31 to June 7, 2023 among a sample of
 n=1,004 respondents. The survey was conducted via web (974) and telephone
 (30) in English (956) and Spanish (48). Data were weighted to represent
 the target population of U.S. adults ages 18 or older. The survey had a
 completion rate of 41.76% and a Survey RR3 of 42.33%. The cumulative
 response rate, accounting for response rate at recruitment, is 2.94%. The
 margin of sampling error for the complete set of weighted data is ± 3.9
 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. We supplement these data
 with waves of WashU's Weidenbaum Center's The American Panel
 Survey (TAPS). More information on the TAPS data can be found at:
 The overtime analysis
 can be replicated using the **Figure5_...R, Figure6_...R, and
 Figure7_....R** scripts and the accompanying **Figure5_...csv,
 Figure6_...csv, and Figure7_...csv** datasets. For the pre-analysis plan,
 deviations from the plan, further details for both the panel and
 cross-sectional surveys including question wordings, additional analyses,
 and a description of the content analysis, please see **Supplementary
 Materials SA Resubmission.pdf**. All recodings are documented in the R
 scripts. For any questions about the data, please contact Shawn Patterson
 ([shawn.patterson@appc.upenn.edu](mailto:shawn.patterson@appc.u)) ##
 Codebooks The **Supplementary Materials SA Resubmission.pdf**
 provides a summary of the variables used in the analysis. The
 **Sample_AIOD_Instrument.pdf** provides an example of the instrument and
 raw variable labels (b22, k3f, etc.) for the panel. Variables generated
 for the analyses are annotated within the R script. For more information
 on the TAPS data and its codebooks, see:
 NA's represent
 missing data where respondents did not answer or skipped the survey item.
 ## Code/Software Data was analyzed in R.  All code needed to replicate
 tables and figures are included. R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16) --
 "Beagle Scouts" Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20 (64-bit)