The 2000 Presidential Election Controversy

Abstract

Previous scholarship on public opinion and the legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court has advanced competing claims about the impact of specific decisions on support for the Court. While some studies have found that specific decisions have strongly affect confidence in the Court, others, including Gibson, Caldeira and Spence, suggest that the empirical data confirms the expectations of Legitimacy theory, which posits that the Court has a relatively strong “reservoir of goodwill” that immunizes it from potentially “legitimacy-threatening” decisions. In this chapter, we analyze data from the 2000 and 2004 Annenberg National Election study to examine the impact of the Bush v. Gore on legitimacy in the Court, using new and different measures of diffuse support or institutional loyalty, and of specific support. While our findings appear to confirm Gibson and his colleagues’ hypotheses and findings generally, with respect to the long-term resilience of the Court, we find that in the short term, the decision did indeed affect the foundations of specific and diffuse support for the Court, as partisanship, race, and ideology both emerge after (but not before) the decision as significant predictors of specific and diffuse support in the Court