Curriculum Vitae:
Vita 149.pdf
Keywords:
Judicial politics, democratization, political psychology, political tolerance, survey research, quantitative research methods, Russian politics, South African politics
Biographical:
James L. Gibson received his B.A. (with highest honors) from Emory University in 1972, and his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1975. He taught at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee from 1975 until 1983, when he joined the faculty at the University of Houston. In 1996, he was named Cullen Distinguished Professor. He joined the Political Science Department at Washington University in 1999. Gibson has research interests in most areas of political science, including comparative politics (especially processes of democratization), American politics (including political parties, public opinion, and especially courts and legal processes), and all areas of quantitative research methods (especially survey research). He has published in virtually every major political journal (from the American Political Science Review to the British Journal of Political Science), has co-authored two books, and his research has received several citations for excellence. Gibson is currently working on studies of a) the consolidation of democratization in Russia, b) political tolerance, justice, and the initiation of democratic reform in South Africa, c) law, legal values, legal consciousness in Bulgaria, France, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Spain, and the United States, and d) the legitimacy of judicial and legal institutions throughout the world. Gibson is immediate past president of the Midwest Political Science Association.
Working Papers:
- Confirmation Politics and the Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court: Institutional Loyalty, Positivity Bias, and the Alito Nomination
Abstract
Gibson, Caldeira, and Spence expound the theory of positivity bias in their analysis of the legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore. This theory asserts that pre-existing institutional loyalty shapes perceptions of and judgments about court decisions and events. In this paper, we use the theory of positivity bias to investigate the preferences of Americans about the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. More specifically, from the theory of positivity bias, we derive the hypothesis that preferences on the Alito confirmation are shaped by anterior commitments to the Supreme Court. Based on an analysis of a national panel survey, we find that those who have a high level of loyalty toward the Supreme Court rely much more heavily on what we term judiciousness in forming their opinions on whether to confirm Alito. Thus, institutional loyalty provides a decisive frame through which Americans view the activity of their Supreme Court.
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- Gibson, James L. 2006. “Challenges to the Impartiality of State Supreme Courts: Legitimacy Theory and ‘New-Style’ Judicial Campaigns.” American Political Science Review forthcoming.
Institutional legitimacy is perhaps the most important political capital courts possess. Many believe, however, that the legitimacy of elected state courts is being threatened by the rise of politicized judicial election campaigns and the breakdown of judicial impartiality. Three features of such campaigns, the argument goes, are dangerous to the perceived impartiality of courts: campaign contributions, attack ads, and policy pronouncements by candidates for judicial office. By means of an experimental vignette embedded in a representative survey, I investigate whether these factors in fact compromise the legitimacy of courts. The survey data indicate that campaign contributions and attack ads do indeed lead to a diminution of legitimacy, in courts just as in legislatures. However, policy pronouncements, even those promising to make decisions in certain ways, have no impact whatsoever on the legitimacy of courts and judges. These results are strongly reinforced by the experiment’s ability to compare the effects of these campaign factors across institutions (a state Supreme Court and a state legislature). Thus, this analysis demonstrates that legitimacy is not obdurate and that campaign activity can indeed deplete the reservoir of goodwill courts typically enjoy, even if the culprit is not the free-speech rights the U.S. Supreme Court announced in 2002.
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- Supreme Court Nominations, Legitimacy Theory, and the American Public:
A Dynamic Test of the Theory of Positivity Bias
Social scientists have taught us a great deal about the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court. Unfortunately, however, most research fails to consider how the public’s views of political institutions like the Court change over time. But opinions can indeed change, with at least two types of “exogenous” sources — controversial Supreme Court decisions and politicized confirmation hearings — providing engines for attitude change. Events such as these may awaken attitudes from their hibernation, allowing for the possibility of updating. Two types of change seem possible: Attention to things judicial may be associated with exposure to highly legitimizing symbols of judicial power (e.g., robes), symbols that teach the lesson that the Court is different from ordinary political institutions and therefore is worthy of esteem. Gibson and Caldeira refer to this as “positivity bias.” Alternatively, events may teach that the Court is not different, that its role is largely “political,” and that the “myth of legality”really is a myth. Since so few studies have adopted a dynamic perspective on attitudes toward institutions, we know little about how these processes of attitude change take place.
Based on a three-wave national survey of ordinary Americans, we attempt to understand the influence of the Alito nomination/confirmation process on loyalty toward the Supreme Court. Our most important finding is that exposure to advertisements by interest groups for and against Alito’s confirmation contributes to the erosion of support for the Court. These advertisements seem to encourage the belief that the Supreme Court is “just another political institution,” which, in the political climate in the country, is not an accolade. Politicized confirmation processes therefore seem to have considerable capacity to undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself.
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- Intolerance and Political Repression in the United States: A Half-Century After McCarthyism
Abstract
What consequences for political freedom arise from high levels of political intolerance among the American mass public? Comparing survey data from 1954 to 2005, I document the level of perceived freedom today and consider how it has changed since the McCarthy era. Levels of intolerance today and in 1954 are also compared. I then assess whether restrictions on freedom are uniformly perceived by all Americans, or whether some subsections of the population are more likely to feel repressed than others. I find that while intolerance may have declined somewhat since 1954, perceived constraints on individual freedom have actually increased. These findings have telling consequences for the theory of pluralistic intolerance. During McCarthyism, intolerance focused on the Left; today, many groups are not tolerated, and therefore the loss of freedom is more widespread. Heretofore, many thought that pluralistic intolerance tended to be relatively benign. At least in the case of the contemporary U.S., I suggest that it is not.
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- Land Redistribution/Restitution in South Africa: A Model of Multiple Values, as the Past Meets the Present
The purpose of this paper is to assess support for redistributive land policy in contemporary South Africa. Based on a large nationally representative survey conducted in 2004, the analysis assesses whether contemporary policy preferences reflect egocentric instrumentalism — direct profit from redistributive policies — or symbolic justice — non-instrumental concern for contemporary and historical injustices against groups. The analysis decidedly favors the symbolic justice hypothesis. In particular, land redistribution is a symbolic issue for most black South Africans, grounded in both larger values connected to land and in concern for the historical injustices of apartheid and colonialism. On nearly every dimension, whites are the mirror image of blacks. Because land policy preferences are so strongly grounded in concerns for historical injustices against groups, the land issue is likely to remain volatile and resistant to “simple” economic solutions. Land is truly an example of historical injustices colliding with the demand for contemporary fairness.
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- Campaigning for the Bench:
The Corrosive Effects of Campaign Speech?
Law and Society Review, forthcoming
Abstract
A new era has emerged in the ways in which candidates for state judicial office campaign. In the past, judicial elections were largely devoid of policy content, with candidates typically touting their judicial experience and other preparation for serving as a judge. Today, in many if not most states, such campaigns are relics of the past. Modern judicial campaigns have adopted many of the practices of candidates for other types of political office, including soliciting campaign contributions, using attack ads, and even making promises about how they will decide issues if elected to the bench.
Not surprisingly, this new style of judicial campaigning has caused considerable consternation among observers of the courts, with many fearing that such activity will undermine the very legitimacy of these fragile legal institutions. Such fears, however, are grounded in practically no rigorous empirical evidence on the effects of campaign activity on public perceptions and evaluations of judicial institutions.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of campaign activity on the perceived legitimacy of courts. Using survey data drawn from Kentucky, I use both post hoc and experimental methods to assess whether public perceptions of courts are influenced by various sorts of campaign activity. In general, my findings are that different types of campaign activity have quite different effects. For instance, policy pronouncements by candidates do not undermine judicial legitimacy, whereas policy promises do. Throughout the analysis, I compare perceptions of courts and legislatures, and often find that courts are far less unique than many ordinarily assume. I conclude this paper with a discussion of the implications of the findings for the contemporary debate over the using elections to select judges to the high courts of many of the American states.
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- Gibson, James L. 2007. “The Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court in a Polarized Polity.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 4 (#3, November): 507-538.
ABSTRACT
Conventional political science wisdom holds that contemporary American politics is characterized by deep and profound partisan and ideological divisions. Unanswered is the question of whether those divisions have spilled over into threats to the legitimacy of American political institutions, such as the United States Supreme Court. Since the Court is often intimately involved in making policy in many issue areas that divide Americans—including the contested 2000 presidential election—it is reasonable to hypothesize that loyalty toward the institution depends upon policy and/or ideological agreement and partisanship. Using data stretching from 1987 through 2005, the analysis reveals that Court support among the American people has not declined. Nor is it connected to partisan and ideological identifications. Instead, support is embedded within a larger set of relatively stable democratic values. Institutional legitimacy may not be obdurate, but it does not seem to be caught up in the divisiveness that characterizes so much of American politics — at least not at present.
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- Challenges to the Impartiality of State Supreme Courts: Legitimacy Theory and “New-Style” Judicial Campaigns
American Political Science Review
Institutional legitimacy is perhaps the most important political capital courts possess. Many believe, however, that the legitimacy of elected state courts is being threatened by the rise of politicized judicial election campaigns and the breakdown of judicial impartiality. Three features of such campaigns, the argument goes, are dangerous to the perceived impartiality of courts: campaign contributions, attack ads, and policy pronouncements by candidates for judicial office. By means of an experimental vignette embedded in a representative survey, I investigate whether these factors in fact compromise the legitimacy of courts. The survey data indicate that campaign contributions and attack ads do indeed lead to a diminution of legitimacy, in courts just as in legislatures. However, policy pronouncements, even those promising to make decisions in certain ways, have no impact whatsoever on the legitimacy of courts and judges. These results are strongly reinforced by the experiment’s ability to compare the effects of these campaign factors across institutions (a state Supreme Court and a state legislature). Thus, this analysis demonstrates that legitimacy is not obdurate and that campaign activity can indeed deplete the reservoir of goodwill courts typically enjoy, even if the culprit is not the free-speech rights the U.S. Supreme Court announced in 2002.
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- "The Political Consequences of Religiosity: Does Religion Always Cause Political Intolerance?"
Extant research has suggested a linkage between religious affiliation and belief and political intolerance. Using data from a 2007 survey of a representative sample of the American people, this hypothesis is investigated. The principal finding of the research is that intolerance is indeed linked to religious beliefs, with religionists expressing considerably more intolerance than those who are not religious. Because a significant number of statistical controls are implemented in the analysis, the linkage between religious beliefs and intolerance may be a causal one. Finally, the “active ingredient” driving this relationship is not nominal religious affiliation, nor even the strength of religious identity, but is instead the collateral beliefs about the role of religion in modern and secular life that are often a consequence of being religious.
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- Campaign Support, Conflicts of Interest, and Judicial Impartiality: Can the Legitimacy of Courts Be Rescued by Recusals?*
James L. Gibson
Gregory A. Caldeira
Abstract
Many legal scholars and observers perceive elected state courts in the U.S. as under siege by the politicization of judicial elections – by candidates for judicial office making policy pronouncements and promises, using ads attacking their opponents (often scurrilously), and, most important, by accepting campaign contributions and support from organizations litigating before the very judges these groups helped elect. Since no form of political capital is more valuable to courts than institutional legitimacy, the hypothesis that campaign activities undermine judicial legitimacy must be taken quite seriously.
Our purpose in this paper is to investigate citizen perceptions of the impartiality and legitimacy of courts. We focus on the residents of West Virginia, because that state has recently been a battleground for intense conflict over campaign support and perceived conflicts of interest and loss of impartiality. We employ an experimental vignette embedded within a representative sample of West Virginians to test hypotheses about several factors that might affect perceived judicial impartiality: (1) campaign contributions and support; (2) the size of such support; (3) whether the judge accused of holding a conflict of interest withdraws from the case; and (4A) if not, whether that judge’s vote was crucial to the outcome, and (4B) if so, whether the party providing the campaign support wins or loses the lawsuit. Our theoretical objectives in this paper are to assess the determinants of citizens’ views of judicial impartiality, following earlier research on how campaigning affects such perceptions. More practically, we test the hypothesis that recusals can rehabilitate a judge and/or court from perceptions of a conflict of interest. In almost every respect, our findings are not as expected. Perhaps most important, contributions offered but rejected by the candidate have similar effects to contributions offered and accepted. And, although recusal can rehabilitate a court/judge to some degree, the effect of recusal is far from the complete restoration of the impartiality and legitimacy of the institution. We are also surprised that about one-third of the respondents are unfazed by the most conflicted circumstance our vignette imagines. We attribute that finding to the “reservoir of goodwill” enjoyed by courts and to the framing effects flowing from pre-existing loyalty to the judiciary. The processes by which citizens form and update their opinions of judges and courts are certainly complicated, but seem at least to involve pre-existing attitudes, expectations of judges, and perceptions of contextual factors, as our analysis of conditional influences demonstrates. Finally, our findings indicate that several of the assumptions of the majority in the recently decided Caperton v. Massey are empirically inaccurate, at least from the viewpoint of the citizens of West Virginia.
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- The Effects of Judicial Campaign Activity on the Legitimacy of Courts: A Survey-Based Experiment, Pennsylvania, 2007*
James L. Gibson
Jeffrey A. Gottfried
Michael X. Delli Carpini
Kathleen Hall Jamieson
Abstract
As elections for state judicial offices have become “noisier, nastier, and costlier” (Schotland 2002), court observers have become increasingly concerned about the consequences of campaign activity for the perceived impartiality of judges and the legitimacy of courts. Unfortunately, however, little systematic evidence exists on how citizens view their state judiciaries and whether those views are shaped by the campaign activities of candidates for judicial office. Perhaps the alarmists are correct about the corrosive effects of politicized campaigning; but perhaps they are instead incorrect to the extent that the American people actually prefer judges to engage in real, policy-based contests for judicial office.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the consequences of judicial campaign activity for the perceived legitimacy of the Pennsylvania judiciary. Based on a panel survey of registered Pennsylvanian voters — conducted before, during, and after the 2007 election — we rely upon a formal, video-based experiment in which subjects are exposed to actual advertisements and related campaign communications broadcast by and about candidates for judicial offices. Our central hypothesis is that those exposed to highly politicized content will extend less legitimacy to courts. The process we believe involved in the changing of attitudes is one in which citizens learn that courts are just “ordinary political institutions,” and, as such, have no special claims to respect and legitimacy.
We find mixed support for the hypothesis that the “new-style” of judicial campaigns poses important threats to the nation’s elected courts. Politicized campaign ads do detract from court support, although we find practically no difference between traditional campaign ads (e.g., presenting endorsements from groups) and strong attack ads. But this finding must be understood within the context of the 2007 election increasing court support for all respondents, even those exposed to the most politicized ad content. Being exposed to politicized ads seems to retard the benefits of elections, but not eliminate them. Our findings suggest that it may be necessary to re-think the expectations the American people hold of their elected judges and courts, and how perceived impartiality and institutional legitimacy can be protected in the context of sharp debate over the policies judges make.
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- Gibson, James L., and Gregory A. Caldeira. 2009. "Knowing the Supreme Court? A Reconsideration of Public Ignorance of the High Court." Journal of Politics 71 (#2, April): 429-441.
Conventional wisdom holds that the American people are woefully ignorant about law and courts. In light of this putative ignorance, scholars and other commentators have questioned whether the public should play a role in the judicial process—for example, whether public preferences should matter for U.S. Supreme Court confirmation processes.
Unfortunately, however, much of what we know—or think we know— about public knowledge of the Supreme Court is based upon flawed measures and procedures. So, for instance, the American National Election Study, a prominent source of the conclusion that people know little if anything about the U.S. Supreme Court, codes as incorrect
the reply that William Rehnquist is (was) a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court; respondents, to be judged knowledgeable,
must identify Rehnquist as the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (which, of course, technically, he was not). More generally, the use of open-ended recall questions leads to a serious and substantial underestimation of the extent to which ordinary people know about the nation’s highest court. Our purpose in this paper is to revisit the question of how knowledgeable the American people are about the Supreme Court. Based on two national surveys—using more appropriate, closed-ended questions—we demonstrate that levels of knowledge about the Court and its
justices are far higher than nearly all earlier surveys have documented. And, based on an experiment embedded in one of the national surveys, we also show the dramatic effect of question-form on estimates of levels of knowledge. Finally, we draw out the implications of political knowledge for the degree to which people support the U.S. Supreme Court. Our findings indicate that greater knowledge of the Court is associated with stronger loyalty toward the nstitution. We conclude by reconnecting these findings to ‘‘positivity theory,’’ which asserts that paying attention to courts not only provides citizens information, but also exposes them to powerful symbols of judicial legitimacy.
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- Gibson, James L., and Gregory A. Caldeira. 2009. “Have Segal and Spaeth Damaged the Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court?”
ABSTRACT
Does understanding how U.S. Supreme Court justices actually decide cases undermine the institutional legitimacy of the nation’s highest court? To the extent that ordinary people recognize that the justices are deciding legal disputes on the basis of their own ideological biases and preferences – Legal Realism and the Attitudinal Model – belief that the justices merely “apply” the law – Mechanical Jurisprudence – is difficult to sustain. Although it is easy to see how the legitimacy of the Supreme Court – the most unaccountable of all American political institutions – is nurtured by the view that judicial decision making is discretionless, mechanical, and technical, the sources of institutional legitimacy under the Attitudinal Model are less obvious. Here we posit – and demonstrate using a nationally representative sample – that the American people understand judicial decision making in realistic terms, that they extend legitimacy to the Supreme Court, and they do so under the belief that judges exercise their discretion in a principled and sincere fashion. Belief in Mechanical Jurisprudence is not a necessary underpinning of judicial legitimacy; belief in legal realism is not incompatible with legitimacy.
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