Scholars of the Supreme Court confront a puzzle: why do conservatives in the public like Supreme Court less than liberals, even though the contemporary Court leans conservative? One answer is that attitudes toward the Court are “lagging” behind these changes in the Court’s composition. In short, people still have the well-known decisions of the more liberal Warren Court in mind when they think about the contemporary Court. See this piece by Marc Hetherington and Joseph Smith.
My colleague Brandon Bartels and his co-author Christopher Johnson have a different answer. They find that although the Court’s decisions under, say, Rehnquist, were more conservative than its decisions under Warren, that’s not reflected in the cases that get lots of media coverage.
A simple way to show this is to ask whether a particular Court decision was on the front page of the _New York Times_ the day after the decision was announced. Call these “salient” cases, knowing that they were likely covered in many other media as well.
When Bartels and Johnson looked at civil liberties and civil rights cases and then broke them down by salience, they found that the “salient” cases were more liberal than the “non-salient cases.” Here is the graph:
This helps explain why conservatives like the Court less than liberals, but in a different way. It’s not that the public hasn’t “caught up” with the Court, it’s that they are hearing and learning more about the Court’s liberal decisions than its conservative decisions.