A Study of the Role of the Van Orden Decision in Shaping Public Opinion

Colorado State University, Fort Collins CO

Investigators

Abstract

There is a lack of consensus on the impact Supreme Court decisions have on the public debate on important issues of the day. Hoekstra (2003) suggests that this disagreement rests on the choice of methodology: experimental studies find that Supreme Court pronouncements tend to influence how people view an issue, but survey research tends to find little or no such impact for Supreme Court decisions. But another source of the disagreement may be related to the issues on which the Supreme Court may have an impact on public opinion. Scholars tend to find little impact of Supreme Court decisions on the most salient issues (abortion, the death penalty) and more impact on less salient issues (search and seizure procedures, for example). This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) will allow us to test the impact the Supreme Court has on public opinion on a relatively salient issue (public display of the Ten Commandments, as brought to the court in the Van Orden case). We seek to improve upon the methodology typically used in this type of study by using quasi-experimental design with the Van Orden case as the stimulus of hypothesized public opinion change. Another improvement we propose to implement is to increase the proximity of the survey administration to the Supreme Court decision to reduce the possibility of the "attribution problems" typically present in this type of study. We also seek to have a broader impact on the literature on public opinion by assessing the impact of an elite signal on mass opinion, something difficult for public opinion researchers to do because elite signals tend to be difficult to anticipate (and Supreme Court decisions are much more predictable).