James L. Gibson (Washington University in St. Louis – Department of Political Science) has posted Do the Effects of Unpopular Supreme Court Rulings Last? The Dobbs Decision Rescinding Abortion Rights on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In a recent article, Gibson presented a remarkable finding: In contrast to the conventional wisdom that U.S. Supreme Court support is obdurate and little responsive to being undermined by unpopular rulings, the Court’s decision rescinding abortion rights (Dobbs) generated a substantial knock on the Court’s institutional legitimacy. As important as that finding is for American politics, however, Gibson’s analysis was limited by two substantial frailties. First, he was unable to determine whether the loss of Court legitimacy persisted over time, since his was a one-shot survey conducted shortly after the Dobbs decision. Second, Gibson was unable to include in his survey measures of democratic values, typically prominent predictors of institutional support, leaving in doubt the question of whether his equations were mis-specified, and, more importantly, being unable to address the possibility of processes of “values-based regeneration” of support. In this analysis, based on a new 2023 survey, I replicate Gibson’s equations but include measures of democratic values. I find that the lost legitimacy persists, but that there is a suggestion in the data that institutional support is being rebuilt owing to the close connection of democratic values and institutional support. Overall, this paper contributes to understanding the complex processes of persuasion and attitude change, with the conclusion that understanding persistence is actually more complicated than many may have thought.