Between impartiality and politicization: Confidence in the judiciary among political winners and losers

Abstract

With courts considered political actors, partisan gaps in perceptions of the judiciary have been widely examined by US political analysts. Contributing to recently expanding research on determinants of public support for courts beyond the US, this article explores how views of the judiciary are politicized in European democracies. Relying on the European Values Study (EVS), we find a gap in confidence in the judicial system between political winners and losers. Yet, this gap is smaller for judicial confidence than for confidence in government and parliament, underlining that courts are not perceived as just another site of partisan politics. Paying attention to variation within the groups of winners and losers, we demonstrate that for all three institutions we study, the gap in confidence is larger for supporters of populist parties than for those supporting mainstream parties. We conclude by showing that the confidence gap narrows as courts become more independent.