The courts/parliament trade-off: Canadian attitudes on judicial influence in public policy

Abstract

Do citizens have meaningful attitudes – i.e. enduring, subjectively important and psychologically consequential evaluative orientations – regarding the relative roles of courts and legislatures in resolving contentious issues of public policy? If so, what explains these preferences? Using data from the Canadian Election Study, the authors find that Canadians possess meaningful attitudes on what they term the ‘courts/parliament trade-off’. They also find significant heterogeneity across levels of political knowledge in the nature of these attitudes. Further, most determinants of attitudes on the courts/parliament trade-off can be understood to reflect evaluations of political outcomes under the courts or Parliament, rather than assessments of processes within these institutions. Attitudes on the trade-off are largely interpretable as responses to dynamic features of party politics.