RAPID: The Dynamics of Minority Support for the Supreme Court.

West Virginia University Research Corporation, Morgantown WV

Investigators

Abstract

Public trust in the Supreme Court is vital for the health of American democracy. Recent controversies, however, have brought unprecedented challenges to the Court’s legitimacy. With trust in the Court at historic lows and recent research suggesting the Court’s legitimacy may be more fragile than previously thought, commentators and scholars alike are raising increasingly dire warnings that the Court’s decisions in highly salient cases have the potential to erode its foundation of public support. Largely missing from this growing discussion of the Court’s public standing, however, is the perspective of the country’s racial and ethnic minorities. As a result, it is unclear whether minority citizens continue to hold the Court in high regard and what impact, if any, the Court’s decisions have on that support. To explore the dynamics of support for the Supreme Court among minority citizens, the project will employ a combination of survey research and elite interviews. A nationally-representative survey of Americans will provide insights into the state of public support for the Supreme Court, with an oversampling of African-American, Hispanic, and Native American respondents allowing for detailed analyses of the Court’s standing among minority citizens. To understand the effect of a significant Court decision on minority citizens’ views of the Court, the project will further focus on the attitudes of Native Americans. To do so, the project will leverage the Court’s anticipated 2023 ruling in a high-profile case in two ways. First, Native American survey respondents will be re-contacted after the Court’s decision with a second wave of the survey, thereby providing an opportunity to evaluate the impact of the ruling on the Court’s support among those most directly affected by the decision. Second, interviews with leaders of Native American tribes both before and after the Court’s decision will grant insights into the ruling’s impact on the views of minority communities’ political leaders. The findings from this research will yield important insights into the Supreme Court’s relationship with minorities at this critical juncture in American politics. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.