Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-68ccn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-15T01:49:41.590Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Faith in the Court: Religious Out-Groups and the Perceived Legitimacy of Judicial Decisions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Andre P. Audette  and
Christopher L. Weaver
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The question of whether judges’ personal characteristics and values bias their decision making has long been debated, yet far less attention has been given to how personal characteristics affect public perceptions of bias in their decision making. Even genuinely objective judges may be perceived as procedurally biased by the public. We hypothesize that membership in a religious out-group will elicit stronger public perceptions of biased decision making. Using a survey experiment that varies a judge's religious orientation and ruling in a hypothetical Establishment Clause case, we find strong evidence that judges’ religious characteristics affect the perceived legitimacy of their decisions. Identifying a judge as an atheist (a religious out-group) decreases trust in the court, while identifying the judge as a committed Christian has no bearing on legitimacy. These results are even stronger among respondents who report attending church more often. Thus, we argue that perceptions of bias are conditioned on judges’ in-group/out-group status.

Type
Articles on Society and the Supreme Court
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 999 - 1022
Copyright
© 2015 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

A previous version of this article was presented at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. The authors would like to thank Matthew Hall, Geoffrey Layman, Amanda Bryan, the editors, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this research.

References

Arceneaux, Kevin (2012) “Cognitive Biases and the Strength of Political Arguments,” 56 American J. of Political Science 271–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baird, Vanessa A. (2001) “Building Institutional Legitimacy: The Role of Procedural Justice,” 54 Political Research Q. 333–54.Google Scholar
Baird, Vanessa A., & Gangl, Amy (2006) “Shattering the Myth of Legality: The Impact of the Media's Framing of Supreme Court Procedures on Perceptions of Fairness,” 27 Political Psychology 597–614.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baum, Lawrence (2006) Judges and Their Audiences: A Perspective on Judicial Behavior. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benesh, Sara C. (2006) “Understanding Public Confidence in American Courts,” 68 J. of Politics 697–707.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berinksy, Adam J., Huber, Gregory A., & Lenz, Gabriel S. (2012) “Evaluating Online Labor Markets for Experimental Research: Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk,” 20 Political Analysis 351–68.Google Scholar
Blake, William (2012) “God Save This Honorable Court: Religion as a Source of Judicial Policy Preferences,” 65 Political Research Q. 814–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bolce, Louis, & De Maio, Gerald (1999) “Religious Outlook, Culture War Politics, and Antipathy Toward Christian Fundamentalists,” 63 Public Opinion Q. 29–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boyd, Christina L., Epstein, Lee, & Martin, Andrew D. (2010) “Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging,” 54 American J. of Political Science 389–411.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buhrmester, Michael, Kwang, Tracy, & Gosling, Samuel D. (2011) “Amazon's Mechanical Turk,” 63 Perspectives on Psychological Science 3–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caldeira, Gregory A. (1986) “Neither the Purse Nor the Sword: Dynamics of Public Confidence in the Supreme Court,” 80 American Political Science Rev. 1209–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caldeira, Gregory A., & Gibson, James L. (1992) “The Etiology of Public Support for the Supreme Court,” 36 American J. of Political Science 635–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caldeira, Gregory A., & Gibson, James L. (1995) “The Legitimacy of the Court of Justice in the European Union: Models of Institutional Support,” 89 American Political Science Rev. 356–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, David E., Green, John C., & Layman, Geoffrey C. (2011) “The Party Faithful: Partisan Images, Candidate Religion, and the Electoral Impact of Party Identification,” 55 American J. of Political Science 42–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Tom S. (2009) “The Separation of Powers, Court Curbing, and Judicial Legitimacy,” 53 American J. of Political Science 971–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Todd, & Moyer, Laura (2008) “Gender, Race, and Intersectionality on the Federal Appellate Bench,” 61 Political Research Q. 219–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Converse, Phillip E. (1964) “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Apter, D., ed., Ideology and Discontent. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Curry, Colleen (2012) “Judge Rejects Suit by Christian Group for Nativity Display,” ABC News 19 November.Google Scholar
Delli Carpini, Michael X., & Keeter, Scott (1996) What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Downs, Anthony (1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Ronald (1978) Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Easton, David (1965) A Systems Analysis of Political Life. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Epstein, Lee, & Knight, Jack (1998) The Choices Justices Make. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press.Google Scholar
Fallon, Richard H. Jr (2005) “Legitimacy and the Constitution,” 118 Harvard Law Rev. 1787–853.Google Scholar
Farhang, Sean, & Wawro, Gregory (2004) “Institutional Dynamics on the U.S. Court of Appeals: Minority Representation under Panel Decision Making,” 20 J. of Law, Economics, and Organization 299–330.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freedman, Samuel G. (2014) “Among Justices, Considering a Divide Not of Gender or Politics, but of Beliefs,” New York Times, 11 July, sec. A, p. 13.Google Scholar
Gangl, Amy (2003) “Procedural Justice Theory and Evaluations of the Lawmaking Process,” 25 Political Behavior 119–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gervais, Will M. (2014) “Everything Is Permitted? People Intuitively Judge Immorality as Representative of Atheists,” 9 PLoS ONE 1–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gervais, Will M., Shariff, Azim F., & Norenzayan, Ara (2011) “Do You Believe in Atheists? Distrust is Central to Anti-Atheist Prejudice,” 101 J. of Personality and Social Psychology 1189–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, James L. (1989) “Understandings of Justice: Institutional Legitimacy, Procedural Justice, and Political Tolerance,” 23 Law & Society Rev. 469–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, James L. (1991) “Institutional Legitimacy, Procedural Justice, and Compliance with Supreme Court Decisions: A Question of Causality,” 25 Law & Society Rev. 631–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, James L., & Caldeira, Gregory A. (2009) “Knowing the Supreme Court? A Reconsideration of Public Ignorance of the High Court,” 71 J. of Politics 429–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, James L., & Caldeira, Gregory A. (2011) “Has Legal Realism Damaged the Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court?” 45 Law & Society Rev. 195–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, James L., & Caldeira, Gregory A. (2013) “Judicial Impartiality, Campaign Contributions, and Recusals: Results from a National Survey,” 10 J. of Empirical Legal Studies 76–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, James L., Caldeira, Gregory A., & Spence, Lester Kenyatta (2005) “Why Do People Accept Public Policies They Oppose? Testing Legitimacy Theory with a Survey-Based Experiment,” 58 Political Research Q. 187–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gillman, Howard (2001) “What's Law Got to Do with It? Judicial Behavioralists Test the ‘Legal Model’ of Judicial Decision Making,” 26 Law & Social Inquiry 465–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, John C. et al., eds. (1996) Religion and the Culture Wars: Dispatches From the Front. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Grey Matter Research (2012) “Most People Dramatically Underestimate the Proportion of Protestants in the U.S., While Seriously Overestimating the Proportions of Mormons, Muslims, and Atheists/Agnostics,” Grey Matter Research. Available at: http://www.greymatterresearch.com/index_files/Religious_Groups.htm (accessed 4 June 2015).Google Scholar
Groves, Martha (2012) “Judge Blocks Nativity Displays in Santa Monica,” Los Angeles Times 19 November.Google Scholar
Harper, Marcel (2007) “The Stereotyping of Nonreligious People by Religious Students: Contents and Subtypes,” 46 Law & Social Inquiry 539–52.Google Scholar
Heise, Michael, & Sisk, Gregory C. (1999) “Women and Men Policymakers: Does the Judge's Gender Affect the Sentencing of Criminal Defendants?” 77 Social Forces 1163–96.Google Scholar
Heise, Michael, & Sisk, Gregory C. (2013) “Free Exercise of Religion Before the Bench: Empirical Evidence from the Federal Courts,” 88 Notre Dame Law Rev. 1371–407.Google Scholar
Hetherington, Marc J. (1988) “The Political Relevance of Political Trust,” 92 American Political Science Rev. 791–808.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hibbing, John R., & Theiss-Morse, Elizabeth (1995) Congress as Public Enemy: Public Attitudes Toward American Political Institutions. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hibbing, John R., & Theiss-Morse, Elizabeth (2002) Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs about How Government Should Work. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunter, James Davison (1991) Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics in America. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Kinder, Donald R., & Kam, Cindy D. (2009) Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations American Opinion. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koch, Jeffrey W. (2000) “Do Citizens Apply Gender Stereotypes to Infer Candidates’ Ideological Orientations?” 62 J. of Politics 414–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Layman, Geoffrey C. (2001) The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Lupia, Arthur (1994) “Shortcuts versus Encyclopedias: Information and Voting Behavior in California Insurance Reform Elections,” 88 American Political Science Rev. 63–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDermott, Monika L. (1997) “Voting Cues in Low-Information Elections: Candidate Gender as a Social Information Variable in Contemporary United States Elections,” 41 American J. of Political Science 270–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDermott, Monika L. (2006) “Not for Members Only: Group Endorsements as Electoral Information Cues,” 59 Political Research Q. 249–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDermott, Monika L. (2009) “Religious Stereotyping and Voter Support for Evangelical Candidates,” 62 Political Research Q. 340–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGuire, Kevin T. (2013) “The Psychological Origins of a Constitutional Revolution: The Supreme Court, Birth Order, and Nationalizing the Bill of Rights,” 66 Political Research Q. 441–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mondak, Jeffery J. (1990) “Perceived Legitimacy of Supreme Court Decisions: Three Functions of Source Credibility,” 12 Political Behavior 363–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mondak, Jeffery J. (1993) “Institutional Legitimacy and Procedural Justice: Reexamining the Question of Causality,” 27 Law & Society Rev. 599–608.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mondak, Jeffery J., & Smithey, Shannon Ishiyama (1997) “The Dynamics of Public Support for the Supreme Court,” 59 J. of Politics 1114–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myers, Martha A. (1988) “Social Background and the Sentencing Behavior of Judges,” 26 Criminology 649–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oppenheimer, Daniel M., Meyvis, Tom, & Davidenko, Nicolas (2009) “Instructional Manipulation Checks: Detecting Satisficing to Increase Statistical Power,” 45 J. of Experimental Social Psychology 867–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Page, Benjamin I., & Shapiro, Robert Y. (1992) The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Payton, Mark E., Greenstone, Matthew H., & Schenker, Nathaniel (2003) “Overlapping Confidence Intervals or Standard Error Intervals: What Do They Mean in Terms of Statistical Significance?” 3 J. of Insect Science 1–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Petrick, Michael J. (1968) “The Supreme Court and Authority Acceptance,” 21 Western Political Q. 5–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pew Research Center (2012) “Little Voter Discomfort with Romney's Mormon Religion,” Pew Research Center. Available at: http://www.pewforum.org/2012/07/26/2012-romney-mormonism-obamas-religion/(accessed 5 October 2014).Google Scholar
Pew Research Center (2014a) “For 2016 Hopefuls, Washington Experience Could Do More Harm than Good,” Pew Research Center. Available at: http://www.people-press.org/2014/05/19/for-2016-hopefuls-washington-experience-could-do-more-harm-than-good/(accessed 5 October 2014).Google Scholar
Pew Research Center (2014b) “How Americans Feel About Religious Groups,” Pew Research Center. Available at: http://www.pewforum.org/2014/07/16/how-americans-feel-about-religious-groups/(accessed 5 October 2014).Google Scholar
Popkin, Samuel L. (1991) The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns. Chicago: Univ. Of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Putnam, Robert P., & Campbell, David E. (2010) American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Ramirez, Mark D. (2008) “Procedural Perceptions and Support for the U.S. Supreme Court,” 29 Political Psychology 657–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheb, John M. II, & Lyons, William (2001) “Judicial Behavior and Public Opinion: Popular Expectations Regarding the Factors That Influence Supreme Court Decisions,” 23 Political Behavior 181–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schenker, Nathaniel, & Gentleman, Jane F. (2001) “On Judging the Significance of Differences by Examining the Overlap Between Confidence Intervals,” 55 The American Statistician 182–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scherer, Nancy, & Curry, Brett (2010) “Does Descriptive Race Representation Enhance Institutional Legitimacy? The Case of the U.S. Courts,” 72 J. of Politics 90–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Segal, Jeffrey A., & Spaeth, Harold J. (1998) The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Sisk, Gregory C., Heise, Michael, & Morriss, Andrew P. (1998) “Charting the Influences on the Judicial Mind: An Empirical Study of Judicial Reasoning,” 73 New York University Law Rev. 1377–500.Google Scholar
Sniderman, Paul M., Brody, Richard A., & Tetlock, Philip E. (1991) Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Songer, Donald R., Davis, Sue, & Haire, Susan (1994) “A Reappraisal of Diversification in the Federal Courts: Gender Effects in the Courts of Appeals,” 56 J. of Politics 425–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sunstein, Cass R. (2007) “If People Would Be Outraged by Their Rulings, Should Judges Care?” 60 Stanford Law Rev. 155–212.Google Scholar
Tajfel, Henri (1970) “Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination” 223 Scientific American 96–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, Tom R., & Rasinski, Kenneth (1991) “Procedural Justice, Institutional Legitimacy, and the Acceptance of Unpopular U.S. Supreme Court Decisions: A Reply to Gibson,” 25 Law & Society Rev. 621–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yarnold, Barbara M. (2000) “Did Circuit Courts of Appeals Judges Overcome Their Own Religions in Cases Involving Religious Liberties? 1970–1990,” 42 Rev. of Religious Research 79–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zink, James R., Spriggs, James F. II, & Scott, John T. (2009) “Courting the Public: The Influence of Decision Attributes on Individuals’ Views of Court Opinions,” 71 J. of Politics 909–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar