Masters Thesis

“Partisan Cues and the Supreme Court: Public Perceptions and Motivated Reasoning”

Committee Chair: Dr. Michael P. Fix

Committee Members: Dr. Toby Bolsen, and Dr. Amy Steigerwalt

Abstract:

The public has two vastly different perspectives on the role of the Supreme Court, the political and institutional. To understand how these two are compatible, I conduct a survey experiment about Supreme Court case decisions while varying political, institutional, and case issues. Specifically, I am interested in how partisan indicators and political ideology effect agreement with case outcomes.  Relying on Nicholson and Hansford’s (2014) theoretical framework about party cues, I propose that motivated reasoning is producing these hyper-partisan  evaluations of the  Supreme Court.