Supreme Court Legitimacy in a New Media Era: Judicial Legitimacy, Polarization, and the Changing Media Landscape

The media environment has changed dramatically in the last 25 years. “New media” sources now dominate the landscape, although there has been very little systematic work on such coverage, particularly as it applies to courts and the rule of law. We use a new tool—SCOTUSapp—to gather news stories spanning five-plus years from thousands of outlets. Specifically, we examine the negativity, simplicity, and ideological tenor of coverage as it relates to Supreme Court coverage. We then connect those three features in an experiment that seeks to understand their impact on Supreme Court legitimacy in an era of polarization. We expect legitimacy will decline when media portrays the institution using ideological, simplistic, and negative coverage, and we expect partisan preferences to condition the impact of coverage, along with the direction of the Court’s ruling, on legitimacy. We administer a survey experiment where respondents read an article about an election law ruling, with treatments that vary the three media traits and ideological direction of ruling. We find significant effects on legitimacy for the interaction of partisanship with decision direction, ideological coverage and, in some specifications, simplistic coverage, but no effects for tone. We then discuss the potential ramifications.