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The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme Court Opinion Clarity
Author(s) -
Black Ryan C.,
Owens Ryan J.,
Wedeking Justin,
Wohlfarth Patrick C.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
law and society review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.867
H-Index - 74
eISSN - 1540-5893
pISSN - 0023-9216
DOI - 10.1111/lasr.12219
Subject(s) - public opinion , supreme court , clarity , majority opinion , dissenting opinion , judicial opinion , readability , supreme court decisions , scholarship , political science , concurring opinion , opposition (politics) , law , psychology , certiorari , politics , computer science , original jurisdiction , biochemistry , chemistry , programming language
We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public opposition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel measure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an individual‐level sample of Supreme Court cases paired with issue‐specific public opinion polls. The empirical results from both models show that justices write clearer opinions when their rulings contradict popular sentiment. These results suggest public opinion influences the Court, and suggest that future scholarship should analyze how public opinion influences the written content of decision makers’ policies.