Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the U.S. Supreme Court's legitimacy-conferring capacity, arguing that the Court attaches some of its legitimacy to its rulings, leading people to accept those decisions. Missing from earlier research is recognition that the U.S. is a federal legal...

Legal scholars and political scientists have of late become quite concerned about how citizens form their impressions of the fairness of courts. This concern reflects the changing environments of courts, especially state courts, and what might generally be termed the politicization of the...

This paper examines the real-time effects of various types of judicial campaign content, including informative, self-promoting advertising, on voter mobilization during the 2007 Pennsylvania judicial election. In an online experiment, subjects were randomly assigned to watch a video containing a...

Political tolerance has long been regarded as one of the most important democratic values because intolerant political cultures are believed to foster conformity and inhibit dissent. Although widely endorsed, this theory has rarely been investigated. Using multilevel regression with...

Conventional political science wisdom holds that contemporary American politics is characterized by deep and profound partisan and ideological divisions. Unanswered is the question of whether those divisions have spilled over into threats to the legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court....

Social science knowledge about public attitudes toward the United States Supreme Court has accumulated over the last few decades to the point that a number of sound empirical propositions have emerged. This article reviews those findings and provides new data from a 2011 nationally...