Theories of democracy all insist on some basic conditions in order for citizens to hold their elected officials accountable. One of the first ones to mention is an openness to new information about the world that might influence beliefs about a politician’s performance, character, intelligence and the like. In recent decades, BPS has discovered that this basic assumption is regularly violated. Citizens and elites often resist new and credible information in favor of their existing beliefs and viewpoints even when they would greatly benefit from updating those stands. In this chapter, we review a related set of theories captured under the umbrella of motivated reasoning that attempts to understand why, exploring the role of cognitive dissonance, self-esteem, and group identity in shaping individuals’ goals when processing information. While the field has no concrete answers yet, we at least have begun to estimate the often dire consequences of arguing from our existing attitudes to our perceptions of the world – top-down processing – instead of the other way around.

Chapter 6 examines how partisan polarization reduces citizens’ willingness to defend the Supreme Court from curbing attacks. The chapter focuses on two national survey experiments which randomly assign respondents to polarized or unpolarized conditions in the context of a salient Supreme Court ruling. While disagreement with Court decisions always increases support for curbing the Court, the effect of disagreement is substantially larger in polarized relative to unpolarized conditions. The chapter demonstrates that the polarization effect is not due to mere partisan branding and that disagreement with specific decisions has a larger impact on support for narrow than broad curbing.

Chapter 2 develops a policy-based theory of public support for Court-curbing, which represents an alternative to process-based perspectives popular in the literature. The chapter distinguishes “broadly targeted Court-curbing,” or support for attacks on the institution’s powers and independence, from “narrowly targeted Court-curbing,” or support for attacks on the Court’s specific rulings. While disagreement with the general ideological direction of the Supreme Court strongly impacts support for broadly targeted Court-curbing, disagreement with specific rulings has a larger effect on narrowly targeted curbing. The theory also explains how and why partisan polarization reduces citizens’ willingness to defend the Court and discusses competing perspectives for how citizens’ level of political engagement moderates the effect of policy disagreement.

Chapter 8 concludes with a summary and synthesis of the book’s findings. It discusses the book’s implications for theories of public support for courts, and situates the book within the broader literature on public opinion and political institutions. The chapter anticipates and responds to criticisms of the book’s theoretical and empirical sections, and explores broader implications for the Court’s independence and power within the American political system.

Chapter 1 sets the scholarly and popular context for explaining how citizens evaluate the United States Supreme Court. It conceptualizes the core outcome of interest throughout the book: public support for Court-curbing, or alterations to the Supreme Court’s powers, structures, and institutional arrangements. We compare this concept to judicial independence and judicial power, and we distinguish it from institutional legitimacy. Chapter 1 also makes important connections to the institutions literature, explaining how a politicized foundation to Court-curbing represents a constraint on judicial independence. We characterize core debates in the scholarly literature centering on “policy (or outcome) versus process.” Policy-based perspectives posit that citizen agreement or disagreement with the Court’s rulings or policy direction will influence support for Court-curbing. Process-based perspectives suggest that non-policy factors such as democratic values, perceptions that the Court is fair and impartial (as opposed to politicized), and knowledge and awareness (via a “positivity bias”) all serve to enhance institutional support for the Court.