Scholars have been quick to try to assess the consequences of the U.S. Supreme Court's monumental ruling abrogating abortion rights in the U.S. (Dobbs), with several studies showing that the decision seems to have ushered in a new era of significantly diminished support for the Court. But important issues remain unresolved. Perhaps most important, how have racial minorities, especially African Americans, been affected by the Court's ruling? Based on an unusually large and representative subsample of African Americans, I discover that a substantial proportion of Black people extend remarkably little legitimacy to the U.S. Supreme Court after Dobbs. Some of the difference between Black and White people seems to be associated with the abortion ruling (as I carefully document), but another portion has to do with much lower levels of support of the Court before Dobbs, and with weaker attachments to legitimacy-enhancing democratic values. I conclude that studies of the attitudes and values of minorities, while important in and of themselves, can also help researchers understand more general processes by which citizens update their institutional attitudes.

Did Trump and his Make America Great Again followers inflict damage on American political institutions via election denialism and the assault on the U.S. Capitol? Although most pundits and many scholars find this a question easy to answer in the affirmative, to date, little rigorous evidence on Trump's institutional consequences has been adduced. Based on surveys of representative samples of the American people in July 2020, December 2020, March 2021, and June 2021, this detailed analysis examines whether American political institutions lost legitimacy over the period from before the presidential election to well after it and whether any such loss is associated with acceptance of the “Big Lie” about the election and its aftermath. My highly contrarian conclusion is simple: try as they might (and did), Trump and his Republicans, in fact, did not succeed in undermining American national political institutions. The empirical evidence indicates that institutions seem to be more resilient than many have imagined, just as legitimacy theory would predict.

New evidence suggests that the world recently changed for the U.S. Supreme Court owing to its decision to abrogate the abortion rights first announced in Roe v. Wade. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that Court support is little undermined by unpopular rulings, the Dobbs decision generated a substantial knock on the Court's legitimacy. Two crucial frailties limit these findings, however. First, no one has determined whether the lost legitimacy has persisted, since earlier research relied on a one-shot survey conducted shortly after the decision. Second, no analysis has addressed the "values-based regeneration" hypothesis-that support reemerges not long after a legitimacy hit is inflicted. Based on a nationally representative 2023 survey, my analysis finds that the lost legitimacy has lingered, but institutional support may be being rebuilt owing to its close connection with democratic values. Overall, I conclude that understanding persistence is more complicated than many may have assumed.

Scholarly interest in whether Americans are willing to freely express their views on political matters has been piqued in recent times, owing in part to concern about the consequences of political polarization. The evidence suggests a massive increase in self-censorship by the American people over the last several decades. This paper expands existing research on reluctance to speak out with an improved measure of self-censorship, a focus on the stark and changing inter-racial and generational differences in perceived political freedom, and by documenting factors not related to self-censorship (such as individual-level polarization, gender, social class, etc.). I conclude with some speculation about the consequences of the loss of freedom of speech for the quality of democracy in the U.S.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling abrogating long-established rights to abortion presents a unique opportunity to understand how people update their attitudes toward institutions. The evidence from earlier studies, reinforced by my newly collected 2023 survey data, is that the ruling produced a substantial hit on the Court’s institutional legitimacy. But what are the mechanisms by which updating takes place? I consider a model of attitude change that posits that specific support evolves quite readily but that diffuse support is “sticky”—as a form of institutional loyalty, it is resistant to change. But it is not entirely impervious to change. The hypotheses I test suggest that major, controversial decisions can cause a realignment of specific and diffuse support, and that is what seems to have happened with Dobbs. To further cement my understand of the causal mechanisms, I show in an experiment that specific support is far more easily changed by a single decision than diffuse support. While I cannot claim that I have fully tested the updating model that has been proposed, my findings on two accounts are compatible with the view that specific support changes first, and, under some (and perhaps extraordinary) circumstances, changed specific support induces change in diffuse support. I close this paper with a call for much more research on the updating of attitudes, in the context of court attitudes and elsewhere.

Extant research has established that displeasure with a Supreme Court ruling typically has negligible consequences for institutional support, largely because, as legitimacy theory's positivity bias explains, judicial decisions are invariably delivered with the accoutrements of legitimizing symbols. The Court's ruling in Dobbs, abrogating a federal constitutional right to abortion services, may challenge legitimacy theory because displeasure with the ruling seems so widespread and intense. This research aims to determine whether the ruling lessened the Court's legitimacy. The general conclusion is that Dobbs produced a sizeable dent in institutional support, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, in part because abortion attitudes for many are infused with moral content and in part owing to the Court's substantial tilt to the right since 2020. Indeed, the Court's legitimacy may be at greater risk today than at any time since Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1930s attack on the institution.

Over the period from the heyday of McCarthyism to the present, the percentage of the American people not feeling free to express their views has tripled. In 2020, more than four in ten people engaged in self-censorship. Our analyses of over-time and cross-sectional variability suggest that, first, self-censorship is connected to affective polarization among the mass public, with greater polarization associated with more self-censorship. Second, levels of mass opposition to full civil liberties bear no relationship to self-censorship. Third, those who perceive a more repressive government are slightly more likely to self-censor. Fourth, conservatives report engaging in more self-censorship than liberals (but this is not true when comparing Republicans with Democrats). Together, these findings suggest that one's larger macro-environment may have little to do with self-censorship. Instead, micro-environment sentiments, such as worrying that expressing unpopular views will isolate and alienate people from their friends, family, and neighbors, may be the driver of self-censorship.

One of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions generating the greatest threat to the legitimacy of the institution is its ruling abrogating the abortion/privacy rights much earlier pronounced in Roe v. Wade. While the Dobbs decision itself produced the greatest lost legitimacy social scientists have ever documented, this paper contemplates the consequences for the Court’s legitimacy of two possible new rulings. The first, reinstating Roe by overruling Dobbs, would result in practically no Americans supporting punishing the Court for its decision. The second, expanding Dobbs to ban all abortions, would result in only about one-half of Americans being willing to extend legitimacy to the institution. Indeed, if there were to happen, more than forty percent of the American people would deny the Court legitimacy and support structural changes to eliminate the justices’ tenure for life. Were the Court to move beyond Dobbs, perhaps even toward undermining privacy rights, a legitimacy crisis for the institution would be created that could have dramatic consequences for the ability of the Court function as it has so far in the modern era.

While interest in the health of American democratic institutions has grown during the Trump era, scholars have not produced many valid and reliable measures of the institutions’ sociological legitimacy. The important exception is among those studying courts. Relying of that literature, as well as the few attempts to measure legislative support in the past, I present some new indicators of the legitimacy of the U.S. Senate and report evidence from a NORC nationally representative survey fielded in 2021. After validating the measures, I examine the correlates of Senate support, focusing in particular on whether Black and White Americans differ in how much legitimacy they extend to the institution. Generally, I find important racial differences. However, perhaps my most important discovery is that Senate legitimacy seems to differ little from the legitimacy of the benchmark institution, the U.S. Supreme Court, and indeed, like Court support, the best predictors of Senate support are people’s commitment to more general democratic values; how people feel about their political institutions seems to be closely intertwined with how they feel about democracy itself. My hope is that this measure of institutional support will aid future researchers in understanding the complexity of citizens attitudes toward legislatures.

Many benefits materialize when people extend legitimacy to institutions, not the least of which is that the effectiveness of the institution is not necessarily contingent on performance satisfaction (at least in the short-term). The same is true of police agencies; therefore, many investigations of the legitimacy of the police have been reported. However, several critical issues remain unanswered. My purpose in this paper is to revisit the question of variability in willingness to extend legitimacy to the police, focusing on a nationally representative sample of African Americans. I test hypotheses connecting police legitimacy with attitudes toward Black Lives Matter, experiences with unfair treatment by legal authorities, ingroup attachments, and attitudes toward systemic racism. My findings indicate little relationship between BLM attitudes and unwillingness to extend legitimacy to the police. However, the effect of BLM on Black public opinion may still have been quite consequential: BLM may have taught Black people that police brutality is an institutional not individual failing, and, consequently, that the fate of all Black people is in fact linked. If so, the consequences for American democracy are profound.

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Political Science QuarterlyEarly View Original Article Judging Inequality: State Supreme Courts and the Inequality Crisis JAMES L. GIBSON, JAMES L. GIBSONSearch for more papers by this authorMICHAEL J. NELSON, MICHAEL J. NELSONSearch for more papers by this author JAMES L. GIBSON, JAMES L. GIBSONSearch for more papers by this authorMICHAEL J. NELSON, MICHAEL J. NELSONSearch for more papers by this author First published: 29 March 2022 https://doi.org/10.1002/polq.13318Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Previous research on the etiology of gender-based violence has focused on support for either core values (such as patriarchal values) or contextual factors (such as the degree to which the woman “violates” gender norms). Little research has put these two analytical strains together. Our purpose here is to investigate how patriarchal values interact with the contextual elements of an experimental vignette, applied to representative samples in two South African provinces. While we find that context matters, patriarchal values not only influence conclusory judgments in real-world disputes, but also influence how the “facts” in real-world disputes are understood and evaluated. As motivated reasoning theory has taught, people are motivated to see the world in a confirmatory way. While few people think of themselves as supporters of violence against women, many more interpret contextual factors in such a way as to create exceptions to those general values.

Ascourge is sweeping the discipline of political science (and other sciences as well). Affecting an enormous proportion of active political scientists, the name of this new disease is “Desk-Reject Affliction.” Every major journal in political science is infected, with journal editors suffering, by far, the most serious cases of this disease. The malady has progressed to the point that many journals, including respected journals, are now desk rejecting1 half or more of the manuscripts submitted to them.2 Some desk rejects involve a single individual—possibly the editor of the journal but perhaps a subeditor—making the decision that a manuscript is not appropriate for the journal and/or, because it is judged that the paper would not survive a normal peer-review process, is not worthy of expending precious reviewer resources.3 Beyond the traditional practice of rejecting unequivocally “off-the-wall” manuscripts (e.g., papers without a bibliography), desk rejects are a fundamental violation of the hallowed principle of peer review. Whereas it may be true that published papers are subject to peer review in one form or another, those not published are not published due to the decision of a small number of people—perhaps only one—whomay not be experts in the paper’s subject matter. For a subeditor in the field of macro-level comparative politics to decide that a paper on micro-level political psychology, for example, does not warrant review by a journal is not a valid example of peer review.More generally, the personmaking the decision to desk reject amanuscript often has entirely different qualifications and expertise compared to a typical subjectmatter peer conducting a review. Moreover, whereas peer review may not necessarily require the views of more than a single reviewer, the standard in political science has been (and is, for papers that are not desk rejected) to make decisions on the basis of multiple independent reviews (see “the dreaded third review”).4 In this sense, our political science journals now have become more like law reviews: many papers are rejected by non-peers without any substantive review andwith little justification. The reasoning behind a desk reject is nearly always opaque and rarely if ever explicated in any detail. Editors sometimes offer gratuitous advice to send the paper to a subfield journal— although the standards for what should be published in a general versus a subfield journal often are completely undetectable from the papers that are published in the journal and are virtually never explicitly articulated by the journal. On occasion, editors may have specific hidden criteria for what type of papers they seek to publish (e.g., no formal theory). It is difficult to regard the typical desk-reject “justification” as a meaningful review of a rejected manuscript. The large literature on procedural justice teaches us that there are two aspects to any given transaction, such as submitting a paper for publication. First, there is the outcome. I suspect it is rare for authors to complain too loudly about procedural failings when the decision is to publish their paper. However, as has been written, “legitimacy is for losers.” That is, the second-most galling aspect of a desk reject is that the rejection is procedurally unfair.5 First, there are instances of editors taking months to desk reject papers, although I suspect this is rare. Second, the failure to provide substantive reviews to justify an editorial decision renders the rejection arbitrary and illegitimate.6 Even the notorious New York Police Department’s use of “stop and frisk” left a paper trail about why the decision to stop someone was made (albeit only after a judge ordered it to do so). Judicial scholars sometimes understand judges’ decisions as reflecting “what the judge ate for breakfast.” Perhaps the same theory is apposite for some editors as well. To be rejected by an unfair process is the worst cut of all. There is another unwelcomed consequence of the deskreject system.When Pat Patterson was editor for the American Political Science Review (ancient history), he often spoke about the review process as a “seminar by mail.” I am sure that most authors have profited from negative reviews from true peers.7 However, papers that are desk rejected repeatedly have little or no hope of improvement because the author is never told what specifically is wrong and how the shortcomings might be corrected. I believe our science and our scientists are harmed by that. Another implication of Desk-Reject Affliction is that editors have assumed far more power than they traditionally have been given. Few authors want an editor who is simply a calculator, doing nothing more than counting the number of positive and negative reviews and deciding accordingly. However, for editors to be able to decide without any accountability (via a paper trail) that a large proportion of papers are not worthy of publication means that editors—whose terms often are years long—have unprecedented influence over the discipline.8 This is not a wise strategy. A discipline shaped by only a few editors is likely to be much different from one in which peers decide what does and does not get published. Why have desk rejects become so commonplace in our discipline in such a short time? Editors (like criminal lawyers who engage in plea bargaining) inevitably claim that if every paper submitted were to consume the time of three reviewers, the editorial process would grind to a halt. There simply are not enough peer reviewers (i.e., juries) to handle the crushing load. Therefore, the problem is that too many papers are being submitted. Desk rejecting has become the solution to this problem.

Many observers of American politics despair over the possible consequences for the health of America’s democratic political culture of the 2020 presidential election, the January insurrection, and the Trump impeachment and acquittal. The specific fear is that popular support for American democratic institutions has been eroded and compromised. Based on a nationally representative survey with a large oversample of African Americans, I address the hypotheses that a) support for democratic institutions is not widespread, b) that significant inter-group differences in support exist, c) that awareness and assessment of these events are connected to democratic support, and d) that support for these institutions is grounded in more elemental and obdurate democratic values. After finding that African Americans extend significantly less support to America’s democratic institutions, I consider whether reverence for these institutions was undermined by the election and its aftermath. My findings cautiously suggest that the election/insurrection events may not have changed many American minds, Black or White; instead, it appears that those already low in support for democratic values were the ones most receptive to elite canards regarding the legitimacy of the election and its outcome. On all aspects of this analysis, I find strong inter-racial differences.

My goal of writing “Against Desk Rejects!” was to stimulate a discussion about an editorial practice that has stealthily crept into our peer-review process almost without any explicit debate. Without recounts and lawsuits, I am going to declare victory on that objective.1 I face two alternatives in this reply to the symposium participants. By one choice, I would seek to rebut each author’s criticism. A second choice is to move the debate forward, letting my peers judge for themselves whether the arguments and analyses of the symposium contributors should be accepted, accepted with revisions, rejected, or even desk rejected. With two exceptions, I have decided to pursue the second choice. The first point I want to rebut concerns the oftenimplicit assumption that it is easy to identify both “weak” or “half-baked” papers and the journal level that best “fits” the paper.2 When I finish a paper, I often do not have a clue as to how good it is, and I typically must seek advice from friends and colleagues about their views on where I might submit it (their views almost always conflict). Furthermore, I am interested to know of any empirical evidence that to “aim high” in submitting a paper for publication is widely regarded by our peers as improper behavior and a “misuse of the journal-submission process.” Indeed, I believe totally in the peer-review process to sort out what is half-baked and what is fully baked. Precisely because there often is ambiguity about the quality and contribution of a paper,3 it is essential that papers be subjected to peer review by subject-matter experts. Second, I was warned in advance that my proposal for fees would be dismissed by some with the vacuous smear of “elitist”—and this did, in fact, turn out to be true.4 Therefore, perhaps it is useful to remind readers that: