Abstract
How does the public respond to court-packing attempts? Longstanding accounts of public support for courts suggest voters retaliate against incumbents who seek to manipulate well-respected courts. Yet incumbents might strategically frame their efforts in bureaucratic terms to minimize the public's outcry or use court-packing proposals to activate a partisan base of support. Drawing on a series of survey experiments, we demonstrate that strategic politicians can minimize electoral backlash by couching court reform proposals in apolitical language, and institutional legitimacy's shielding effect dissolves in the face of shared partisanship. These results shed new light on how ambitious politicians might avoid electoral consequences for efforts to bend the judiciary to their will.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 290-311 |
Number of pages | 22 |
Journal | Journal of Law and Courts |
Volume | 11 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 24 2023 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Sociology and Political Science
- Political Science and International Relations
- Law