Do attitudes toward specific supreme court decisions matter? The impact of Webster and Texas v. Johnson on public confidence in the supreme court

In this article, we revisit the question of whether, and in what manner, attitudes regarding specific Supreme Court decisions influence subsequent levels of confidence in the Court itself. Analysis centers on the impact of the 1989 Webster abortion decision and Texas v. Johnson, the flag-burning edict released immediately prior to Webster. Using data from three Harris polls, one conducted just before the two decisions, and two conducted soon after, we design a quasi-experimental test in which data are analyzed using ordered logistic regression. Results demonstrate that agreement with the rulings did affect perceptions of the Court, and that the pattern of effects is indicative of a negativity bias; that is, disagreement with one or both decisions substantially reduced confidence in the Court, but agreement with both edicts brought only a marginal gain in confidence. Results also reveal that these effects did not decay in strength from the time of the first postdecision poll (conducted immediately after the decisions were released) to the time of the second postdecision poll (conducted six weeks later).