Social Environment, Public Opinion, and Judicial Policymaking a Search for Judicial Representation

Abstract

An important theme in research on judicial policymaking is a search for the role of courts as representative political institutions. The most general way that courts represent the public is through the relationship of patterns of judicial decisions to local public opinion and values. Most previous research provides only indirect evidence that courts represent public opinion. We examine the separate and combined effects of public opinion and social environments on criminal court sentencing as a way of isolating the effect of public opinion and progressing toward a general theory of judicial representation. The article examines patterns of sentencing in all 20 Florida judicial circuits. The findings are that courts do not respond to public opinion but they are sensitive to various social contexts surrounding the courts, particularly urban crime environments and the size of the nonwhite population. High crime rates and large nonwhite populations do stimulate public concern with crime, but public opinion does not relate to sentencing. High crime rates actually reduce sentencing severity. The article concludes that judicial representation does not occur and that it is incorrect for researchers to substitute crime rates for direct measures of public opinion in the mistaken belief that courts will respond to crime rates in the same way the public does.