Concurring opinion

Abstract: It is commonly assumed that Supreme Court justices' votes largely reflect their attitudes, values, or personal policy preferences. Nevertheless, this assumption has never been adequately tested with independent measures of the ideological values of justices, that is, measures not taken from their votes on the Court. Using content analytic techniques, we derive independent and reliable measures of the values of all Supreme Court justices from Earl Warren to Anthony Kennedy. These values correlate highly with the votes of the justices, providing strong support for the attitudinal model.

Abstract: The Supreme Court, like all political institutions, requires some minimal level of support because, as the high bench performs its political and constitutional roles, the justices must on occasion stand against the winds of public opinion. With data from a recent national survey, we reexamine the levels, sources, and explanations of public support for the Supreme Court. Since racial differences in attitudes toward the Court are so great, we focus here only on the attitudes of white U.S. citizens. Our purposes are both substantive and methodological. On the substantive front, we examine changes in the etiology of support. We investigate the traditional explanations of diffuse support, but, more important, we introduce and evaluate the power of a new set of variables, political values. These political values do an uncommonly good job of predicting attitudes toward the Court. In addition, we devote particular attention to the important role of "opinion leaders" as supporters of the Court. These leaders relate to the Court in a fashion very different from that of the mass public. On the methodological front, we offer an alternative means of thinking about and capturing diffuse support for the Court among the mass public. We close with speculations about the process by which diffuse support for the Court changes over time and, more generally, the implications of attitudes among the mass public and opinion leaders for the functioning of the Supreme Court.

Abstract: The concept of issue salience has figured prominently in many studies of American political life. Long lines of research have taught us that both citizens and political elites may respond differently to issues that are salient to them than to those that are not. Yet analysts making such claims about elite actors face a fundamental problem that their counterparts in mass behavior do not: they cannot survey, say, members of the Supreme Court to ascertain those cases that are especially salient to the justices. Rather, scholars must rely on surrogates for issue salience-surrogates that are fraught with problems and that have led to disparate research results. Accordingly, we offer an alternative approach to measure issue salience for elite actors: the coverage the media affords to a given issue. We argue that this approach has substantial benefits over those employed in the past. Most notably, it provides a reproducible, valid, and transportable method of assessing whether the particular actors under investigation view an issue as salient or not. In making the case for our measure we focus on Supreme Court justices but we are sanguine about its applicability to other political actors