Reevaluating ideological asymmetries in specific support for the Supreme Court

Recent studies show the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center undermined multiple forms of support for the Supreme Court. These findings are in tension with existing work on the ideological structure of specific support of the Supreme Court, which finds more tolerance for ideological disagreement among liberals than among conservatives. In this note, we replicate and extend Haglin et al. (2021), whose analysis ends in 2018. We find that asymmetries in the association between Supreme Court approval and Americans’ ideological disagreement with the Court have changed substantially and abruptly, depressing aggregate Supreme Court approval. However, this break in the structure of Supreme Court approval occurred in the year preceding Dobbs . These results indicate the roots of Americans’ turn against the Supreme Court run deeper than Dobbs and suggest a startling erosion in judicial legitimacy.