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Attack ads damage support for Supreme Court

Posted on | July 15, 2009 | 1,695 views |

By Jeff Grabmeier

Nasty, politicized Supreme  Court nomination battles may erode public support of the high court, according to a study of public reactions to the Samuel Alito nomination process.

In a new book, researchers reveal how television advertisements during Alito’s 2005 nomination battle had a disturbing side effect: Many people who viewed those highly political ads became less supportive of the Supreme Court as an institution.

The reason seems to be that, in the minds of many viewers, the ads reduced Supreme Court justices to just “politicians in robes,” said Gregory Caldeira, co-author of the book and professor of political science at Ohio State.

“Americans have long believed that Supreme Court justices are above politics,” Caldeira said. “Anything that drags the court into ordinary politics damages the esteem of the institution.”

The results have renewed significance now, with the recent nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the high court, Caldeira said.

“If interest groups air attack ads against Sotomayor, that could undermine some of the public support for the court, just as they did (in 2005),” he said.

The study is described in the book Citizens, Courts and Confirmations (Princeton University Press), which Caldeira wrote with James Gibson, a professor of government at Washington University in St. Louis.

In many ways, their study was a happy accident. In the summer of 2005, the researchers surveyed a representative group of 1,001 Americans concerning their knowledge and beliefs about the US Supreme Court. When Chief Justice William Rehnquist died in September 2005, the researchers knew they had an opportunity to study how the nomination of a new justice would affect public opinion of the court.

So in January 2006, the researchers re-interviewed more than 300 of the original survey participants to see if their views changed after the nomination of Alito, who became a justice on Jan. 31, 2006. Many participants were interviewed a third time in May and June 2006.

In the first survey, about 69 percent of participants showed general support for the Supreme Court. But substantial proportions changed their views after the Alito nomination.

About 36 percent of those surveyed showed less support for the court after the process, 24 percent stayed the same and 39 percent showed more support.

Caldeira said that in an analysis of these results, one result stood out: People who saw ads by interest groups either promoting or denouncing Alito’s nomination were most likely to become less supportive of the court as a whole.

The results had nothing to do with people just paying closer attention to the nomination process and simply seeing more ads, according to Caldeira. In fact, those who paid more attention to the confirmation were more supportive of the court — as long as they didn’t view many ads.

The ads did their damage by defying the image people had of the court as being “above” politics, Caldeira said.

One ad against Alito’s nomination, for example, claimed Alito “even voted to approve the strip-search of a 10-year-old girl … The Right Wing has already taken over the West Wing. Don’t let them take over your Supreme Court.”

A pro-Alito ad countered that “Every day, desperate liberals make up a steady drip of attacks against Judge Samuel Alito.”

Caldeira said, “These kind of attack ads are similar to what one would see in a congressional race. They take information out of context and frame the person as an extremist.”

And it wasn’t just supporters of Alito’s nomination who disliked the ads — opponents of his confirmation who were strong supporters of the court were more likely than Alito supporters to say the ads were unfair.

Caldeira said the Sotomayor nomination may not generate as many attack ads as the Alito nomination did. Some conservative groups may be reluctant to attack Sotomayor too harshly because she is Hispanic — a critical constituency for both Republicans and Democrats.

But he noted that, for social conservatives, the makeup of the Supreme Court is an especially big issue, and that may lead some of them to believe it is worth it to attack Sotomayor as too liberal.

Caldeira said that it is unlikely that interest group ads about justice nominees, by themselves, could do significant, permanent damage to the court’s legitimacy.
Nonetheless, the legitimacy of the court is an important resource that should be protected.

“Americans accept the decisions of the Supreme Court because they see it as a legitimate judicial institution,” he said. “If the  court loses that legitimacy, all Americans lose.”

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