Introduction
Understanding why people support democratic institutions is essential to many questions about political phenomena, and research on law and courts is no exception. As scholars have recognized, public evaluation of judicial institutions plays a critical role in explaining the behavior of courts and political elites in the United States and beyond (Carrubba and Zorn Reference Carrubba and Zorn2010; Clark Reference Clark2009; Helmke Reference Helmke2010b; Krehbiel Reference Krehbiel2016; Staton Reference Staton2006; Vanberg Reference Vanberg2001). Under the premise that public support fosters judicial independence, the last decades have witnessed significant and diverse scholarly efforts devoted to better understanding this relationship (Badas Reference Badas2019; Bartels et al. Reference Bartels, Horowitz and Kramon2023; Carrubba Reference Carrubba2009; Driscoll and Nelson Reference Driscoll and Nelson2023; Gibson et al. Reference Gibson, Caldeira and Baird1998; Stephenson Reference Stephenson2004).
But what makes citizens more prone to support judicial institutions in the first place? While extant research has examined how characteristics of both individuals and contexts explain public evaluation of courts,Footnote 1 a fundamental aspect of our knowledge of public support for judicial institutions arises from understanding how citizens react to court decisions. In recent years, a growing body of work has explored how salient judicial decisions influence individuals’ evaluation of courts (Bartels et al. Reference Bartels, Horowitz and Kramon2023; Bartels and Johnston Reference Bartels and Johnston2013; Christenson and Glick Reference Christenson and Glick2015a, Reference Christenson and Glick2015b, Reference Christenson and Glick2019; Nicholson and Hansford Reference Nicholson and Hansford2014). However, as this literature focuses on attitudes about specific (usually pinnacle) courts, we know little about whether and how salient rulings inform public beliefs about the judiciary writ large – that is, the broader, encompassing political institution at stake.
This is an important question to address. First, focusing on public beliefs about the judiciary as a whole helps us better understand broader, yet critical, questions in comparative politics, such as the conditions for judicial power and independence (Vanberg Reference Vanberg, Caldeira, Kelemen and Whittington2008) as well as the incentives and constraints faced by elites seeking to engage in judicial backsliding (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2023; Haggard and Tiede Reference Haggard and Tiede2025; Mazepus and Toshkov Reference Mazepus and Toshkov2022). Second, given that judicial institutions are generally not salient to the public, citizens may well draw conclusions about the entire judicial system based on high-profile actions of high courts. Thus, to understand citizens’ attitudes about the judicial branch, it is crucial to examine how citizens react to politically salient court decisions.
This article proposes an account of how publics evaluate the judiciary in the wake of judicial checks on the government, that is, salient rulings against the incumbent’s interest. I argue that judicial checks affect support for judicial institutions writ large, but these effects are shaped by citizens’ instrumental considerations – namely, partisanship. This is because if judicial checks are specific, salient instances of interbranch conflict, then they expose individuals to information that is fundamentally instrumental, allowing citizens to update their beliefs about the judiciary in light of such interbranch dynamics. My theory yields a main observable implication: following judicial checks on the government, we should expect incumbents’ co-partisans to withdraw support from the judiciary, while opposition co-partisans should be more supportive of that institution.
I test these theoretical expectations by studying two politically salient judicial rulings released in Argentina in 2013. The decisions, enacted by a federal lower court and the national Supreme Court, invalidated a controversial judicial reform introduced by the government. Taking advantage of the fact that the 2013 Latinobarómetro survey was fielded before and after the courts rulings, I estimate the effect of these judicial decisions on respondents’ trust in the judiciary. In line with my hypotheses, the results show that, among respondents who identified as supporters of the government, those interviewed after the rulings express less trust in the judiciary than those surveyed before the court decisions. In contrast, opposition supporters show higher levels of trust in the judiciary following the Supreme Court ruling, but not the lower court decision. These effects are substantial in magnitude and remain robust to a variety of modeling specifications. Moreover, suggestive evidence indicates that these partisan effects of the Supreme Court decision were larger among better-informed respondents. These findings provide support for the mechanism proposed by my account – that judicial checks expose individuals to information that is primarily instrumental.
This article makes several contributions. First, by theorizing a channel through which judicial behavior influences trust in the judiciary, and empirically testing this account, I contribute to current scholarship on the determinants of public support for judicial institutions writ large (Aydın-Çakır and Şekercioğlu Reference Aydın-Çakır and Şekercioğlu2016; Bühlmann and Kunz Reference Bühlmann and Kunz2011; Garoupa and Magalhães Reference Garoupa and Magalhães2021; Magalhães and Garoupa Reference Magalhães and Garoupa2020; Salzman and Ramsey Reference Salzman and Ramsey2013). Moreover, this article provides further empirical support for the recent, but influential, literature emphasizing the instrumental foundations of citizens’ support for judicial institutions (see Bartels and Johnston Reference Bartels and Johnston2020). While this work has mostly studied the United States ( Armaly Reference Armaly2018; Christenson and Glick Reference Christenson and Glick2015a), my empirical attention to Argentina takes the theoretical expectations of this literature to a context that is understudied but typical of the developing world.Footnote 2 Importantly, by focusing on politically salient court decisions, I am able to assess specific observable implications of instrumental theories of public support for judicial institutions involved in interbranch conflicts. Further, my emphasis on explaining public evaluations of the broader judiciary contributes to a literature that has overwhelmingly focused on the effects of judicial decisions on citizens’ attitudes toward pinnacle courts (Bartels and Johnston Reference Bartels and Johnston2013; Christenson and Glick Reference Christenson and Glick2015a).
Second, this article speaks to the larger literature on comparative judicial politics and the separation of powers. While a large amount of past research has advanced our knowledge about the conditions under which courts engage in interpower conflicts (Bill Chávez Reference Bill Chávez2004; Carrubba et al. Reference Carrubba, Gabel and Hankla2008; Couso Reference Couso2003; Helmke Reference Helmke2002; Hilbink Reference Hilbink2007; Iaryczower et al. Reference Iaryczower, Spiller and Tommasi2002), a subset of this literature has explained the role of public support in such instances (Helmke Reference Helmke2010b; Helmke and Staton Reference Helmke and Staton2011; Pereira Reference Pereira2022; J Staton et al. Reference Staton, Reenock and Holsinger2022; Staton Reference Staton2006). Yet, to my knowledge, no prior work in comparative politics has empirically examined whether and how specific, real-world instances of interbranch dispute – particularly judicial checks on the government – can influence public attitudes about the judiciary writ large. That judicial challenges of incumbents can trigger heterogeneous partisan reactions among the citizenry has crucial implications for our understanding of the role of public support amid interpower dynamics (Carrubba Reference Carrubba2009; Krehbiel Reference Krehbiel2016, Reference Krehbiel2019; Staton Reference Staton2006; Vanberg Reference Vanberg2001) and raises new questions about the strategic behavior of both courts and elected officials. More broadly, my findings underscoring partisan reactions to judicial checks speak to contemporary debates on citizens’ support for checks-and-balances institutions and democratic principles (Graham and MW Svolik Reference Graham and Svolik2020; Mazepus and Toshkov Reference Mazepus and Toshkov2022; Singer Reference Singer2018; M Svolik Reference Svolik2020).
This article proceeds as follows. In the next section, I discuss the related literature and motivate my theoretical expectations. Section 3 describes the context this article studies and its identification strategy. Section 4 presents the main results, while Section 5 address concerns over unobserved cofounders. Section 6 discusses preliminary and suggestive evidence about the mechanism at play. Section 7 concludes by identifying avenues for future research.
Court Rulings and Public Support for the Judiciary
To endure and ensure their efficacy, all democratic institutions require some degree of support from the public. If disapproved by a sufficient number of citizens, institutions are feeble and rendered impotent to achieve their goals. Lacking the ‘purse and the sword’, public support is particularly important for judicial institutions. As scholars have long recognized, citizens’ backing of courts nourishes autonomous judicial power (cf. Bartels Reference Bartels, Fix and Montgomery2024; Caldeira Reference Caldeira1987; Murphy and Tanenhaus Reference Murphy and Tanenhaus1968; Staton Reference Staton2010), a condition for judicial institutions willing to provide meaningful checks on incumbents’ transgression of their constitutional authority (Gibson et al. Reference Gibson, Caldeira and Baird1998; Vanberg Reference Vanberg2005).
However, judicial review of governmental action is risky business for many courts around the world. When judges are called to place a check on other branches, they expand their province of jurisdiction (Vallinder Reference Vallinder, Tate and Vallinder1995), venturing into deciding on issues politically sensitive to sitting, powerful officials. Critically, such involvement has the potential to expose courts to interbranch conflicts, including attacks on judicial institutions (Helmke Reference Helmke2010b; Vanberg Reference Vanberg2015).
Consider, for instance, some anecdotal examples of this phenomenon across various political and institutional contexts, which reveal the relationship between courts’ independent decision making and incumbents’ backlash. Vanberg (Reference Vanberg2000) documents how West Germany’s Chancellor Adenauer publicly threatened disobeying a Constitutional Court’s decision against the government and even considered institutional changes to the judicial institution. Similarly, upon a series of Supreme Court rulings invalidating pieces of the ‘New Deal’, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with his infamous court-packing plan (Caldeira Reference Caldeira1987). More recently, the Israeli Supreme Court struck down key government policies, thus accelerating government efforts to overhaul the judiciary (Braman et al. Reference Braman, Sommer and Kamoun2025; Kershner Reference Kershner2023). In 2023, the Argentinian president initiated a formal impeachment process against all the Supreme Court Justices – a decision that was motivated by recent Supreme Court rulings against the interests of the national government (Lau Alberdi Reference Lau Alberdi, Albert, Landau, Faraguna and Andrade2024; Reuters 2023).
Regardless of whether these anecdotal attempts to retaliate against independent judicial decision making were successful or not, the fact that these interbranch dynamics occur frequently (and even in environments where courts are broadly respected) raises some important questions. If public support is critical for judicial institutions, can citizens become bulwarks of judicial independence when governments attack courts for their decisions? More specifically, how do citizens evaluate the judiciary in the wake of court rulings that are salient to incumbents?
While the question of ‘how specific judicial decisions map onto public opinion’ (Helmke Reference Helmke2010a, 397) has been widely studied in the literature,Footnote 3 existing work explores the effects of judicial rulings on public attitudes about specific (usually pinnacle) courts. Yet this approach leaves understudied any impact that these decisions may have on citizens’ evaluation of the judiciary as the broader, encompassing political institution at stake. This gap is all the more relevant as the public’s assessment of high court decisions could serve as a basis for their views on the judiciary as a whole. Examining whether and how these ‘spill-over’ effects occur, then, is critical to gain a full understanding of the public-based sources of judicial legitimacy (Easton Reference Easton1975; Gibson et al. Reference Gibson, Caldeira and Baird1998), a pre-requisite for the exercise of judicial power (Bartels Reference Bartels, Fix and Montgomery2024; Staton Reference Staton2010; Vanberg Reference Vanberg2005). In the next section, I propose an account of public support for the judiciary, which brings together scholarship on public opinion about judicial institutions writ large and literature studying the effects of court rulings.
Partisan Reactions to Judicial Checks
Given the centrality of public support for judicial power, a great deal of attention has been devoted to understanding the determinants of citizens’ evaluation of the broader, encompassing judicial institution at stake (for example, the ‘judiciary’, ‘legal system’, or ‘courts of law’). Existing work shows that individual-level characteristics – such as awareness, knowledge, partisanship, and experience with courts – help explain variation in public trust in such institutions (Bartels and Kramon Reference Bartels and Kramon2020; Benesh Reference Benesh2006).
Yet, context matters. The properties of judicial institutions play a crucial role in explaining citizens’ trust in the judiciary writ large (Bühlmann and Kunz Reference Bühlmann and Kunz2011; De Micheli and Taylor Reference De Micheli and Taylor2024; Driscoll et al. Reference Driscoll, Aydın-Çakır and Schorpp2024; Fix et al. Reference Fix, Randazzo and Martin2021; Salzman and Ramsey Reference Salzman and Ramsey2013; Walker Reference Walker2016). These institutional indicators – such as the levels of judicial independence, judicial accountability, or democracy – matter because they proxy for the actual behavior and strategic environment of courts. This judicial behavior, in turn, becomes critical information for citizens evaluating the broader judiciary. Indeed, scholars have argued that public trust in the judiciary is higher among ‘citizens living in countries with well-performing judiciaries’ (Salzman and Ramsey Reference Salzman and Ramsey2013, 76) or where ‘courts and judges perform well or behave independently from any external political influences’ (Aydın-Çakır and Şekercioğlu Reference Aydın-Çakır and Şekercioğlu2016, 636).
This rationale that judicial behavior informs public beliefs about the judiciary has underpinned the theoretical foundation for comparative research showing that institutional and contextual factors moderate the effect of individual-level features on attitudes about judicial institutions (Staton Reference Staton2010, chaps 5-6; Gandur et al. Reference Gandur, Chewning and Driscoll2025). For example, scholars have argued that increased knowledge and awareness about courts leads to better evaluations of the judiciary only where levels of judicial independence, accountability, and democracy are higher. In contrast, in contexts where courts perform badly, non-independently, or are politically constrained, knowing more about these institutions leads to more negative views about the judiciary (Aydın-Çakır and Şekercioğlu Reference Aydın-Çakır and Şekercioğlu2016; Garoupa and Magalhães Reference Garoupa and Magalhães2021; Salzman and Ramsey Reference Salzman and Ramsey2013; Staton Reference Staton2010). The key idea is that public trust in the broader judicial institutions is a function of citizens’ reaction to how courts actually behave: where tribunals perform as they should, publics increase their assessment of the judiciary ( Bühlmann and Kunz Reference Bühlmann and Kunz2011).
In line with previous work, I suggest that judicial behavior influences evaluations of the broader judiciary. Yet, my argument deviates from existing scholarship in two ways. On the one hand, I focus on specific instances of interbranch conflicts – judicial checks by which courts limit incumbents’ power on salient cases, an institutional feature that has received little attention. Such an approach, I suggest, is better suited to assess whether and how courts’ behavior explains variation in citizens’ trust in the judiciary (for example, Magalhães and Garoupa Reference Magalhães and Garoupa2020). On the other hand, my account differs from previous work in that I relax the assumption that individuals hold homogeneous and uniform perceptions of judicial behavior. Instead, I suggest that individuals vary in how they react to instances of judicial checks, and identifying the sources of such variation helps us understand citizens’ attitudes about the broader judicial institutions in the wake of judicial checks.
My account theorizes one channel through which judicial behavior affects support for judicial institutions writ large. I argue that courts’ politically salient decisions influence public trust in the judiciary, but this effect is fundamentally shaped by citizens’ instrumental considerations, in particular partisanship. I suggest that these considerations dominate because of the salient nature of interbranch conflicts, where the information about courts that citizens are exposed to is primarily instrumental.
This argument builds upon two claims. First, recent work both in the United States and beyond has demonstrated that public attitudes about courts are endogenous to citizens’ instrumental concerns – that is, individuals evaluate judicial institutions more positively when courts advance their partisan or ideological interests (Bartels and Johnston Reference Bartels and Johnston2013). In particular, scholars have demonstrated that partisan preferences and support for the government shape how individuals evaluate judicial institutions (Bartels and Kramon Reference Bartels and Kramon2020, Reference Bartels and Kramon2022; Driscoll et al. Reference Driscoll, Aydın-Çakır and Schorpp2024), and that these considerations also drive public reactions to court rulings (Bartels et al. Reference Bartels, Horowitz and Kramon2023; Christenson and Glick Reference Christenson and Glick2015a; Nicholson and Hansford Reference Nicholson and Hansford2014).
My second claim relates to why partisanship matters when evaluating judicial decisions. Scholars have suggested different mechanisms underlying the ‘effect’ of partisanship on public responses to salient court rulings. Under Bartels and Kramon’s (Reference Bartels and Kramon2020) partisan alignment theory, citizens want courts to attain partisan political advantages, with government (opposition) co-partisans being less (more) likely to support courts’ power to constrain executive power. Some work emphasizes the role of citizens’ attitudes about the substantive policy reviewed by courts (Christenson and Glick Reference Christenson and Glick2019; see also Carrubba Reference Carrubba2009; Stephenson Reference Stephenson2004), which is likely to be correlated with partisanship. Other scholars highlight the role of party cues, where citizens take into consideration the political preferences of their leaders when evaluating judicial institutions (Armaly Reference Armaly2018; Clark and Kastellec Reference Clark and Kastellec2015). Finally, judicial decisions can also inform individuals about the ideological tenor of the ruling court (Bartels and Johnston Reference Bartels and Johnston2013), a strong predictor of party identification.
This article suggests an alternative account. When it comes to evaluation of judicial institutions writ large, I argue that instances of interbranch conflicts provide citizens with information that is essentially instrumental. That is, politically salient judicial checks help individuals better understand the political alignment of judicial institutions relative to the government.Footnote 4 We have reasons to believe that this form of interpower dynamics prompts individuals to update their beliefs about judicial institutions at large. First, not only can judicial checks on the government draw courts into conflict with incumbents, but they also increase the visibility of judicial institutions (Gibson et al. Reference Gibson, Caldeira and Spence2003b; Grosskopf and Mondak Reference Grosskopf and Mondak1998; Krehbiel Reference Krehbiel2021), which tend to be largely overlooked by the public (Bowal and Wanke 2001; Gibson et al. Reference Gibson, Caldeira and Baird1998). Thus, we can expect sudden spikes in public attention to significantly impact citizens’ attitudes toward the judiciary, at least in the short term.Footnote 5
Moreover, even when judicial checks come from specific courts, this information can shape citizens’ assessment of the judiciary writ large. Research suggests that experiences with particular courts may influence individuals’ evaluation of general to broader judicial institutions (Glavina and van Zimmeren Reference Glavina and van Zimmeren2025; Montinola Reference Montinola, Cook, Levi and Hardin2009). If these local experiences are informative to citizens’ opinion about the judiciary, then the information that salient judicial checks provide may well impact such public attitudes as well.
In sum, how courts behave and perform is crucial to understanding public evaluations of judicial institutions writ large ( Aydın-Çakır and Şekercioğlu Reference Aydın-Çakır and Şekercioğlu2016; Bühlmann and Kunz Reference Bühlmann and Kunz2011; Garoupa and Magalhães Reference Garoupa and Magalhães2021). I argue that specific instances of courts challenging incumbents will have heterogeneous effects on public support for the judiciary: supporters of the government will react negatively towards judicial checks, and those politically opposed to the government will praise courts’ limits on the power of the incumbent. If this logic is sound, court rulings that impose a check on the incumbent will decrease trust in the judiciary among individuals that are politically aligned with the government, whereas such judicial checks will increase trust among those politically identified with the opposition. This rationale suggests the following hypotheses:
HYPOTHESIS 1 (H1): Exposure to court decisions against the incumbent will decrease trust in the judiciary among government supporters.
HYPOTHESIS 2 (H2): Exposure to court decisions against the incumbent will increase trust in the judiciary among opposition supporters.
Moreover, if politically salient judicial checks provide information about the alignment of courts relative to the government, the partisan reactions to court decisions will increase as citizens become better informed and more politically aware. This leads to the following hypothesis:
HYPOTHESIS 3 (H3): The partisan reactions to court decisions against the incumbent will be larger among better informed and more politically aware citizens.
Research Design
Context: The 2013 Reform of the Argentinian Judicial Council
During the opening of the legislative year in March of 2013, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández announced a series of judicial reform bills to be sent to Congress – reforms whose overall goal was to ‘democratize the judiciary’, but that most opposition groups saw as an attempt to undermine judicial independence and pack the federal judiciary (Elias Reference Elias and Turenne2015; Llanos Reference Llanos2014). The most controversial reform involved substantial modifications to the Argentinian Judicial Council, an interbranch constitutional body that has played a crucial role in the selection and removal of federal lower court judges since 1998 (Bill Chávez Reference Bill Chávez2007; Elias Reference Elias and Turenne2015; Walsh Reference Walsh2020). The Judicial Council is composed of members that represent Congress and the executive, as well as federal judges, attorneys, and the academic community throughout the country.
Although the Argentinian Constitution establishes which groups and institutions are to be represented in the Judicial Council (Congress, executive, judges, attorneys, and academics), a law by Congress determines the exact number of members and how those members are chosen to serve in the Council. Prior to the 2013 reforms, the Judicial Council had thirteen members.Footnote 6 While the executive and Congress selected their members to the Council, the representatives of judges, attorneys, and academics were chosen through elections in which only their peers (that is, other sitting federal judges, licensed attorneys, and academics, respectively) were allowed to vote.
On 8 May, 2013, with the support of parties aligned with the executive – and the disapproval of opposition parties – the Argentinian Congress passed the government’s bill to reform the Judicial Council. The reform increased the number of representatives of attorneys (from two to three) and academics (from one to six) on the Judicial Council. Moreover, the new law changed the selection method of the representatives of judges, attorneys, and academics, who would now be subject to popular elections – and not chosen by their peers exclusively, as before. Also, the reform required that candidates for these seats are affiliated with a political party. After the Judicial Council reform was passed, President Fernández issued an executive order that called for elections of representatives of judges, attorneys, and academics to be carried out during the mid-term primary legislative elections in August 2013.Footnote 7
The reform of the Judicial Council was broadly controversial, triggering criticism from political actors opposed to the government and even legal challenges to the new law. In particular, a ‘list’ (for example, party) of candidates running for attorney seats in the Judicial Council filed a lawsuit questioning the constitutional validity of the judicial reform and requested the suspension of the elections for representatives of judges, attorneys, and academics.Footnote 8 On 11 June, a lower district court judge ruled that the reform of the Judicial Council was in conflict with Argentina’s Constitution. The judge also invalidated the call for elections concerning the representatives of judges, attorneys, and academics that the President had issued via executive order. In response, the government filed a direct appeal to the Argentinian Supreme Court, who released its decision on 18 June.Footnote 9 The Supreme Court’s ruling upheld the lower judge’s opinion, therefore striking down the Judicial Council reform and suspending the call for elections for Judicial Council representatives. These series of court rulings became known as the Rizzo decisions, given the plaintiff’s last name.
These two judicial decisions had widespread media coverage. SI B3 shows that the three mainstream Argentinian newspapers featured both the lower court and Supreme Court decisions on their front cover the day after the rulings. More importantly, this media coverage evidenced the heightened partisan acrimony of the debates around the judicial decisions. In particular, government officials largely criticized the rulings, while opposition leaders applauded the court decisions. For instance, the then Chief of Staff characterized the Supreme Court ruling as an ‘affront to the Argentinian people’, considering it ‘inconceivable that, after 30 years of our democracy, some institutions still maintain a retrograde vision, typical of other centuries’ (Télam 2013a).Footnote 10 In contrast, the House leader of the main opposition party asserted that ‘the Supreme Court acted with honesty and judgmental independence, and it invalidated the [government’s] attempt to subjugate the Judiciary’ (Clarín 2013). The lower court ruling triggered similar reactions among actors from the government and opposition parties (see LaNación 2013; Página12 2013).Footnote 11
Furthermore, both the lower court and Supreme Court decisions were highly salient to the larger citizenry, as Figure 1 indicates. The figure plots Google Trends data on search activity in Argentina for the term ‘Judicial Council’ (Consejo de la Magistratura) from March to June 2013 and shows that interest in the Judicial Council increased as it became politically salient. Importantly, the data also show that search activity on the Judicial Council increased notably following the lower and Supreme Court rulings (11 June and 18 June, respectively). In sum, Figure 1 suggests that Argentines were responsive to the political events surrounding the reform of the Judicial Council – including the court rulings in June – and provides evidence that the judicial decisions were salient to the general public.
Google trends search activity.
Note: The figure uses Google Trends data to plot search interest in the term ‘Judicial Council’ (Consejo de la Magistratura). The data were obtained using the gtrendsR package in R (Massicotte and Eddelbuettel Reference Massicotte and Eddelbuettel2022). See SI B4 for more information on how Google Trends collects and measures search activity.
The 2013 Latinobarómetro Survey in Argentina
While these political events were taking place in Argentina, the Latinobarómetro Corporation was interviewing individuals for their 2013 nationally representative survey.Footnote
12
The survey was fielded from 1 June to 30 June, and it interviewed a total of
$1,200$
Argentinian respondents. Figure 2 displays the distribution of respondents throughout June 2013 as well as the dates the lower and Supreme Court rulings were released.
Distribution of respondents during the 2013 Latinobarómetro survey.
Note: The figure shows the distribution of Latinobarómetro respondents by date of interview. The dashed lines mark the date of the lower court and Supreme Court rulings.
Importantly, the Latinobarómetro survey included a four-point scale that asked respondents how much trust they had in the judiciary: ‘a lot’, ‘some’, ‘a little’, or ‘no’ trust. While this and similar items have been widely used in comparative courts and public opinion ( Aydın-Çakır and Şekercioğlu Reference Aydın-Çakır and Şekercioğlu2016; Bühlmann and Kunz Reference Bühlmann and Kunz2011; De Micheli and Taylor Reference De Micheli and Taylor2024; Fix et al. Reference Fix, Randazzo and Martin2021; Helmke Reference Helmke2010a; Salzman and Ramsey Reference Salzman and Ramsey2013; Walker Reference Walker2016), there are two main concerns about this measure. On the one hand, a rich literature studying support for individual courts has raised concerns about using trust items to measure citizens’ enduring loyalty toward judicial institutions. While I acknowledge the shortcomings of employing this item relative to measures of diffuse support or legitimacy, it is a valid outcome for this article’s purposes. First, since debates around trust items have been theoretically and empirically circumscribed to attitudes about specific, pinnacle courts (Gibson et al. Reference Gibson, Caldeira and Spence2003b; Gibson and Nelson Reference Gibson and Nelson2015), the extent to which criticism toward these items applied to evaluation of broader judicial institutions is not clear. Second, even if these concerns apply to the outcome examined in this article, scholars have suggested that trust items reflect ‘a blend of short-term and long-term judgments of the institution’ (Gibson et al. Reference Gibson, Caldeira and Spence2003a, 364; see also Driscoll and Nelson Reference Driscoll and Nelson2018). This implies that trust measures, albeit limited, still offer valuable insights into the public’s meaningful beliefs about judicial institutions.Footnote 13
On the other hand, this measure raises questions about the extent to which respondents are expressing their attitudes about the judiciary writ large, rather than the individual courts involved in the political events surrounding the 2013 Latinobarómetro survey in Argentina.Footnote 14 While data and design limitations prevent me from fully ruling out this possibility, SI J addresses the concern in greater detail, where I present theoretical arguments and empirical evidence supporting the view that Latinobarómetro’s trust question reflects citizens’ beliefs about the broader judicial institution.Footnote 15 In any case, readers should keep in mind that the outcome measure may partially reflect spillover from court-specific evaluations.
Figure 3 shows the distribution of the Trust in the Judiciary survey item, which I use as the outcome variable in the analyses. For simplicity, I employ the binary version, where
$0$
means a respondent had a little or no trust in the judiciary, and
$1$
reflects a lot or some trust.Footnote
16
Trust in the judiciary.
Note: The panels show the distribution of the binary and ordinal measures of the outcome (Trust in the Judiciary) across Latinobarómetro respondents.
Taking advantage of the fact that the rulings were released while Latinobarómetro was in the field, I can split the sample of respondents into three ‘quasi-experimental’ groups: a ‘control’ condition (respondents interviewed on or before 11 June) and two ‘treatment’ conditions (respondents interviewed between 12 June and 18 June, and respondents interviewed on or after 19 June).Footnote 17
Partisanship indicator
The survey also included information about interviewees’ partisanship. In the analyses below, I employ the indicator Government supporter to denote whether a respondent is a supporter of a party aligned with the government or a supporter of an opposition party.Footnote 18 While this measurement approach drops respondents without any partisan identification and thus reduces the sample size considerably (see SI A3 and SI H ), the resulting partisanship indicator has the advantage of identifying those unequivocally aligned with or opposed to the government, which is a fundamental component of theories of partisan support for judicial institutions (cf. Bartels and Kramon Reference Bartels and Kramon2020, Reference Bartels and Kramon2022).
SI H presents analyses that include ‘non-partisan’ supporters. The results reveal three main takeaways: the main findings are robust to the inclusion of non-partisans, the effects of the rulings are generally greatest in magnitude among both government and opposition supporters, and non-partisans significantly decrease their trust following the Rizzo decisions. SI H discusses these findings in detail and offers a potential explanation for the negative effect among non-partisan respondents based on the literature on judicial impartiality and the myth of legality.
Identification strategy
The timing of both the invalidation of the Judicial Council reform and the Latinobarómetro survey offers an unusual opportunity to estimate the partisan reactions to the court decisions, as measured by Latinobarómetro respondents’ expressed trust in the judiciary. My identification strategy exploits the fact that the Rizzo decisions were independent of the survey fieldwork, thus assigning pre- and post-Rizzo respondents as if randomly (Muñoz et al. Reference Muñoz, Falcó-Gimeno and Hernández2020). Yet, the Latinobarómetro survey could have been administered in a way that citizens more or less prone to support the judiciary were systematically interviewed before or after the court decisions, making treated and control units fundamentally different.Footnote 19 For instance, since the nationally representative survey was not conducted simultaneously around the country, it is plausible that demographically dissimilar provinces, cities, or neighborhoods were surveyed earlier or later in the process. Indeed, although most provinces and cities have respondents in both the control or treatment groups, there are some regions that were interviewed only before or after the lower or Supreme Court rulings (see SI AI ).Footnote 20 To make credible claims, however, this research design requires Latinobarómetro respondents surveyed before the rulings to be comparable to those interviewed in the days following the rulings – otherwise, changes in trust in the judiciary could be an artifact of differences in other individual-level characteristics, rather than the court rulings’ effects.Footnote 21
To check for balance across groups, I use presumably pre-treatment survey items asked in the 2013 Latinobarómetro poll.Footnote 22 Table 1 displays mean values, standard deviations, and exact p-values using randomization inference tests (Young Reference Young2019). Although the groups seem fairly balanced, the table shows that there is imbalance with respect to respondents’ education (more educated in treatment groups), SES (the ‘Very good’ category is more frequent in the treatment groups), and subjective income (higher in the lower court condition). Such imbalances are potentially problematic because research has shown that political sophistication and education are associated with support for courts (Benesh Reference Benesh2006; Fix et al. Reference Fix, Randazzo and Martin2021). To deal with this concern and achieve balance across groups, the analyses presented below also employ (1) entropy weights (Hainmueller Reference Hainmueller2012) and, alternatively, (2) weights generated by genetic matching (Diamond and Sekhon Reference Diamond and Sekhon2013; Sekhon Reference Sekhon2011). These methods help mitigate model dependency and improve balance, ensuring that the results are not driven by differences in observable covariates. Moreover, the matching specifications (which allow for matching with replacement and multiple matched control observations) employ a larger sample, which helps alleviate concerns over statistical power. These strategies rely on the conditional ignorability assumption (Muñoz et al. Reference Muñoz, Falcó-Gimeno and Hernández2020): that conditional on a set of (observable) covariates related to how the Latinobarómetro survey was fielded, the rulings are independent of respondents’ potential outcomes (see also Casas et al. Reference Casas, Curci and De Moragas2024). These methods address threats raised by observables; Section 5 discusses analyses that tackle the concern that unobservables are confounding my findings.
Covariate balance across conditions
Note: The table shows means and exact p-values (Young Reference Young2019) using randomization inference tests with
$100,000$
random samples.
While in studying the effects of salient judicial rulings I follow previous work,Footnote 23 my research design has the advantage of studying attitudes about the judiciary without the need to prime respondents about the court decisions – which may potentially introduce bias in respondents’ evaluation of the judiciary (see Grosskopf and Mondak Reference Grosskopf and Mondak1998, 650; Hitt et al. Reference Hitt, Saunders and Scott2019, 37).Footnote 24 Moreover, by exploiting real-world judicial rulings, this design achieves greater external validity as compared to survey and laboratory experiments that expose individuals to hypothetical court decisions ( Bartels and Johnston Reference Bartels and Johnston2013; Mondak Reference Mondak1990, Reference Mondak1991).Footnote 25
These methodological features make this article well-suited to examine both whether courts’ behavior influences public evaluation of judicial institutions writ large, and whether such attitudes are driven by citizens’ instrumental concerns. To the extent that my theoretical expectations with respect to these questions apply broadly, Argentina is an excellent case to empirically focus on. As SI B1 shows, Argentina is a representative case according to a number of institutional and public opinion indicators both historically as well as in 2013. The country’s interbranch environment and levels of support for courts have been typical in comparative perspective, outside the oft-studied environments of the United States and Western Europe. In particular, SI B1.1 suggests that overall levels of judicial independence, government compliance with court orders, and democracy in Argentina have been typical of most countries around the world, falling between those of more consolidated democracies and those in the developing world. Similarly, public opinion data indicate that average trust in the Argentinian judiciary has been close to the mean and median values across Latin American countries (see SI B1.2 ).
Results
Table 2 presents the results of fitting linear probability models of the relationship between the court rulings and trust in the judiciary.Footnote 26 To examine the heterogeneous effects of the judicial decisions, all models include an interaction term between the treatment indicator and the government supporter variable. The columns in Table 2 show the effect of the lower court (models 1–3) and Supreme Court (models 4–6) rulings on respondents’ trust in the judiciary. The table presents three main specifications: OLS (models 1 and 4), weighted least squares (WLS) with entropy balance weights (models 2 and 5), and WLS using multivariate matching and weights computed by genetic optimization (models 3 and 6), as discussed in the previous section.Footnote 27
Main results
Note: Outcome: Trust in the Judiciary (
$0 = $
‘A little’/‘None’;
$1 = $
‘A lot’/‘Some’). Robust standard errors clustered by city and date of survey interview. Controls: Age, Female, Education, SES, Subjective Income, Class, Religion. Models 2 and 4 employ entropy balance weights (Hainmueller Reference Hainmueller2012). Models 3 and 6 employ multivariate matching (Sekhon Reference Sekhon2011) with optimal balance weights computed using the genetic matching algorithm (Diamond and Sekhon Reference Diamond and Sekhon2013)
${{\rm{\;}}^{\rm{*}}}p \lt 0.05$
;
${{\rm{\;}}^{{\rm{**}}}}p \lt 0.01$
;
${{\rm{\;}}^{{\rm{***}}}}p \lt 0.001$
Table 2 shows that all the coefficients on the interaction terms between the court rulings and the co-partisanship indicator are negative and statistically significant at the 5 per cent level or less. This result indicates that the rulings had a significant negative effect among government supporters, as compared to opposition supporters. To better understand these heterogeneous effects, Figure 4 plots the expected average changes (first differences) in trust in the judiciary following the court decisions by respondents’ partisanship.
Heterogeneous effects of the court rulings.
Note: The panels show the expected effect (first difference) of the lower court (white circle) and Supreme Court (black triangle) rulings on trust in the judiciary among government supporters and opposition supporters. The vertical axis indicates the first difference in the outcome following each judicial ruling. The panels are based on the analyses presented in Table 2: models 1 and 3 (OLS, left), models 2 and 5 (EB+WLS, middle), and models 3 and 6 (GM+WLS, right). Thick and thin lines correspond to 90% and 95% confidence intervals, respectively.
Substantively, the panels in Figure 4 show that both court rulings had significant, negative effects on government supporters’ trust in the judiciary. In particular, the lower court ruling (white circle) decreased the probability of trusting the judiciary by about
$0.27$
–
$0.32$
(
$p \lt 0.01$
), and the Supreme Court decision (black triangle) decreased the probability of trusting the judiciary by about
$0.24$
–
$0.37$
(
$p \lt 0.01$
). These effects of are of considerable magnitude – they represent, on average, about 63 per cent (lower court) and 71 per cent (Supreme Court) of the outcome mean values and translate into average decreases of more than half of a standard deviation in respondents’ trust in the judiciary (lower court:
$0.54$
; Supreme Court:
$0.63$
). Together, these results provide strong support for H1, which predicted the judicial decisions to have a negative impact among those respondents who support the government.
Among respondents who identified as supporters of an opposition party, only the Supreme Court ruling had positive, statistically significant effects on public trust in the judiciary. As the table indicates, the judicial decision against the government increased the probability of trusting the judiciary by about
$0.25$
(OLS model,
$p \lt 0.05$
) and
$0.27$
–
$0.30$
(EB and GM models,
$p \lt 0.001$
). Again, these magnitudes are not trivial, as they denote more than half of the mean value of the outcome – a positive average change of more than
$0.54$
standard deviations in respondents’ trust in the judiciary. This finding indicates that opposition supporters were more trustful of the judicial institution after the Supreme Court invalidated the reform of the Judicial Council. This provides support for H2 with respect to the Supreme Court decision, but not regarding the lower court ruling.Footnote
28
It is worth discussing the null findings among opposition supporters in the wake of the lower court ruling. One possibility is that respondents were simply less aware of this decision. However, this explanation falls short, as government supporters did respond to the lower court ruling. This suggests the need to consider differences in the informational environment between opposition and government supporters. In particular, it is plausible that newspapers aligned with the government reported more extensively on the lower court ruling than outlets critical of the incumbent (see SI B3.1 ).Footnote 29
Another set of factors relates to opposition supporters’ expectations following the lower court decision. Negativity bias offers one such explanation: individuals are more likely to punish political actors for failing to meet their expectations than to reward them for simply doing what is expected (Sheafer and Dvir-Gvirsman Reference Sheafer and Dvir-Gvirsman2010; Soroka and McAdams Reference Soroka and McAdams2015). In the context of judicial institutions, for instance, Christenson and Glick (Reference Christenson and Glick2019) find that the negative effects of salient court decisions are stronger for individuals who are more ideologically distant from the court (see also Gibson and Nelson Reference Gibson and Nelson2015; Mondak and Smithey Reference Mondak and Smithey1997). Alternatively, the muted reaction among opposition supporters may reflect their expectation that the decision would be appealed. Yet this, too, does not fully account for the asymmetries between government and opposition supporters. Ultimately, the pattern is likely the result of a combination of these various factors, and future research investigating these partisan asymmetries would enrich the existing literature on public support for judicial institutions.
Unobserved Confounders
This article’s design relies on the assumption that, other than the covariates I balance and match in the statistical models, there are no other omitted variables. However, I cannot reject the possibility that unobservables are confounding the results. In particular, it is possible that the treatment groups are unbalanced on some unobserved factors. Even though this article’s design does not allow me to rule out that possibility entirely, this section presents two sets of analyses that help me address this concern. First, I conduct placebo tests. The logic underlying this exercise is the following. If respondents in the control and treatment conditions are systematically different on some unobserved, relevant covariates, then such imbalances should show up as differences in respondents’ beliefs and attitudes towards institutions and actors unrelated to the judiciary.
To examine this alternative, I run placebo regressions in which the outcome is trust in different groups and institutions (that is, the police, church, armed forces, television, neighbors, etc.) included in the 2013 Latinobarómetro poll (see SI H1
). As with the main analyses, I fit linear models with entropy balance weights.Footnote
30
For each outcome, Figure 5 plots the coefficient on the Court ruling
$ \times $
Government supporter interactions (upper panel) and first differences (lower panel) with respect to the lower court (gray lines) and Supreme Court (black lines) rulings across government and opposition supporters. Figure 5 shows that – except for a few cases – the court rulings are insignificant predictors of government and opposition supporters’ attitudes about a wide array of institutions and groups unrelated to the judiciary.
Placebo tests.
Note: The panels show the effect of the lower court and Supreme Court rulings on different outcomes across government and opposition supporters. See SI G2 for information about these outcome items. The top panel plots the coefficient on the Court ruling x Government supporter interaction (lower court, gray; Supreme Court; black) with respect to each outcome. The bottom panel plots the first differences in each outcome (lower court, gray; Supreme Court, black) among government supporters (triangles) and opposition supporters (circles). The panels are based on linear models using entropy balance weights. Thick and thin lines correspond to 90 per cent and 95 per cent confidence intervals, respectively.
Moreover, note that the magnitude of the few statistically significant coefficients and first differences displayed in Figure 5 is considerably smaller than the effects on public trust in the judiciary shown in Table 2 and Figure 4. Most importantly, the panels do not display clear partisan trends, which suggests that any differences in the figure do not explain the main findings. Overall, these results indicate that, after accounting for imbalance on the covariates included in the main models, the treatment and control groups do not seem to be substantially different from each other. In other words, if respondents interviewed before and after the Rizzo decisions vary systematically in some (unobserved) characteristics, such dissimilarities are not associated with the extensive set of attitudes shown in the panels.
In addition to these placebo tests, SI G3
presents the results of sensitivity analyses (see Cinelli and Hazlett Reference Cinelli and Hazlett2020; Frank et al. Reference Frank, Lin, Xu, Maroulis and Mueller2023). These exercises also support the credibility of the main results. For example, with respect to the Supreme Court decision, sensitivity analyses based on
${R^2}$
parameterization (SI
G3.1
) indicate that any unobserved confounders must explain at least about
$23$
–
$32{\rm{cent }}$
of the residual variance both of the treatment and of the outcome to reduce to zero the interaction coefficients reported in Table 2.Footnote
31
More importantly, the analyses also suggest that, in most of the models, any hypothetical confounders as strong as Government supporter are not sufficient to explain away the observed interaction estimates. In other models, such a hypothetical confounder would need to explain about 45 per cent or 70 per cent of the variation in the outcome. Given the extensively documented strong association between government co-partisanship and support for judicial institutions ( Armaly Reference Armaly2018; Bartels and Kramon Reference Bartels and Kramon2020, Reference Bartels and Kramon2022; Driscoll et al. Reference Driscoll, Aydın-Çakır and Schorpp2024; Nicholson and Hansford Reference Nicholson and Hansford2014; Sen Reference Sen2017), these sensitivity analysis results lend greater confidence in the main findings.Footnote 32 Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine an unobserved confounder stronger than the Government supporter indicator.
In sum, although the placebo tests and sensitivity analyses reported in this section do not conclusively rule out unobserved confounding, these exercises do provide empirical evidence against the possibility that partisan reactions to the rulings are driven by unobserved differences across treatment groups.
Exploring the Mechanism
My theory suggests that judicial checks provide citizens with information that is primarily instrumental in nature (H3). If such information is driving the partisan reactions to the Rizzo rulings, then we should expect to see stronger effects among better informed respondents and those who are more politically aware. To preliminarily test this hypothesis, I employ two Latinobarómetro items that may proxy for how well informed and politically aware respondents are: newspaper frequency (measured by the question ‘How many days in the past week did you read news in a newspaper?’) and political interest (from ‘not at all’ to ‘very’ interested). Figure 6 plots the impact of the Supreme Court decision across respondents’ levels of newspaper frequency and political interest.
Supreme Court ruling effect by newspaper frequency and political interest.
Note: The panels show the expected effect (first difference) of the Supreme Court ruling on trust in the judiciary across values of log (newspaper frequency + 1) (left panel) and political interest (right panel) among opposition supporters (solid line) and government supporters (dotted line). The panels are based on analyses employing genetic matching weights and the extensive set of covariates. Lighter and darker shaded areas indicate 95 per cent and 90 per cent confidence intervals, respectively.
Although I do not draw strong causal conclusions from the patterns shown in Figure 6, there are important concerns about the validity of the newspaper frequency measure, which may obscure the interpretation of these results. For example, frequent newspaper readers may focus more on non-political news, and newspapers in Argentina may not be entirely objective sources of information. This makes it challenging to disentangle the ruling’s impact from media coverage.Footnote 33 I explore these issues in detail in SI I . While I am ultimately unable to fully isolate the effect of the ruling from media influence, additional analyses suggest that the newspaper frequency item likely measures respondents’ exposure to political news (rather than non-political news) (SI I1 ), and media freedom in Argentina is fairly high, indicating that newspapers’ coverage is largely independent from the government (SI I2.1). Yet, potential media effects do limit the generalizability of the results and could suggest an imprecise treatment (SI I2.2 ). Therefore, the effects shown in the left panel of Figure 6 should be interpreted conservatively as the joint effect of the Rizzo ruling and any influence from media coverage (cf. Muñoz et al. Reference Muñoz, Falcó-Gimeno and Hernández2020).
Figure 6 reveals that, as respondents become better informed and more politically interested, the effect of the Supreme Court decision on public trust in the judiciary increases in magnitude.Footnote 34 Yet, notably, these effects move in opposite directions depending on whether respondents support the government or the opposition. Although these estimates are substantively similar across government and opposition supporters, they are imprecise among the former group. While Figure 6 is consistent with the mechanism suggested by H3, the imprecise estimates, along with concerns about post-treatment bias and statistical power, demand caution in interpreting these findings.
Despite their limitations, the suggestive patterns shown in the figure nicely complement existing comparative work on judicial institutions and public opinion. Extant research shows that the relationship between courts’ performance and public evaluations of the judicial institution is stronger among more aware, informed, or knowledgeable individuals (Aydın-Çakır and Şekercioğlu Reference Aydın-Çakır and Şekercioğlu2016; Garoupa and Magalhães Reference Garoupa and Magalhães2021; Salzman and Ramsey Reference Salzman and Ramsey2013). The reason is that these subgroups hold more accurate beliefs about the actual functioning of courts in a given political context. Figure 6 adds another layer to this story. If the judicial behavior that citizens observe provides instrumental information, better informed and more aware publics will exhibit partisan heterogeneity, regardless of whether the courts function well or poorly.Footnote 35
Conclusion
This article contributes to our understanding of citizens’ support for judicial institutions writ large. In line with the theoretical expectations, the results demonstrates that partisanship drives citizens’ reactions to judicial checks on the incumbent. Suggestive evidence indicates that these partisan effects intensify among better informed and politically aware citizens, indicating that judicial checks provide information about the alignment of courts relative to the government.
While the theory is generally applicable, there may be certain scope conditions that warrant discussion. In principle, the theory is better suited to explain the relationship between court rulings and support for judicial institutions in contexts with stable partisan attachments.Footnote 36 If citizens want judicial institutions to advance their partisan interests, and judicial checks help them better understand the judiciary’s alignment relative to the government, then party stability becomes an important condition. In the context of this study, president Fernández’s Peronist (Justicialist) party has historically represented a stable partisan cleavage (Calvo and Murillo Reference Calvo and Murillo2004; Levitsky Reference Levitsky1998). This stability may have facilitated partisan evaluations of the judiciary among both government and opposition supporters. Moreover, strong attachment to the Peronist Party might help explain the asymmetric partisan reactions to the lower court ruling shown in Figure 4. While similar stable partisan cleavages suggest that the theory applies well to the United States, its expectations are less clear in contexts where such a condition is absent. One might expect judicial checks to elicit weaker partisan reactions in places where citizens have weak partisan attachments. However, increased polarization may enable partisan evaluations of the judiciary even in contexts of unstable party systems or where citizens lack strong attachment to their parties. Research exploring the impact of these institutional factors would be a valuable contribution.
Alongside its contributions, this study faces limitations that point to new opportunities for future research on law and courts, especially from a comparative perspective. For one thing, the political context studied in this article may limit the generalizability of the results. Because the reform involved changes to the judicial institution itself and was highly salient, the effects described here may not extend to other policy areas. Relatedly, given that the reform to the judicial council would have theoretically increased democratic participation in the judiciary, it remains unclear to what extent partisan reactions to the Rizzo decisions reflect citizens’ political attitudes distinct from partisanship – namely, beliefs about judicial accountability and democratic responsiveness. While data availability precludes me from addressing this possibility, the 2013 judicial reform presents a promising opportunity for scholars interested in these questions.
Moreover, the outcome I examined – trust in the judiciary – is conventionally understood to be a measure of specific (in contrast to diffuse) public support for courts (cf. Driscoll and Nelson Reference Driscoll and Nelson2018). To the extent that new conceptual and empirical work develops more enduring measures of citizens’ attitudes about judicial institutions writ large, future research should inquire whether and how judicial checks can affect public legitimacy of the judiciary. In addition, the data and design of this article do not allow me to assess how long-lasting the (partisan) effects of the Rizzo rulings may be. Finally, we know little about how media influence shapes partisan reactions to salient court rulings, a fruitful avenue for theoretical and empirical inquiry.
Ultimately, the findings discussed in this article raise new questions that are relevant for two sets of literatures. On one hand, a prominent body of work has argued that public support serves as a protective mechanism for judicial institutions facing attacks from the other branches (Helmke Reference Helmke2010a; Krehbiel Reference Krehbiel2016; Staton Reference Staton2006; Vanberg Reference Vanberg2001). If judicial actors care about the citizenry, my results – showing that judicial checks bring about public opinion costs and rewards – suggest that courts must factor in the partisan nature of citizens’ attitudes toward judicial institutions in their strategic calculations. While a great deal of recent work has been devoted to showing that citizens evaluate courts through partisan lenses both in the United States and beyond ( Bartels and Kramon Reference Bartels and Kramon2020; Nicholson and Hansford Reference Nicholson and Hansford2014), the judicial politics literature has yet to incorporate this instrumental dynamic of public support into models of the separation of powers, constitutional review, and judicial behavior.Footnote 37
On the other hand, my results indicating that government supporters react negatively to judicial checks on incumbents, combined with the possibility that political leaders can shape such attitudes ( Sen Reference Sen2017), raise new questions about elite behavior in response to politically salient court challenges, including incumbents’ compliance with judicial orders and advancement of court-curbing proposals. Future research in these areas will undoubtedly deepen our understanding of the role of public support for judicial institutions in interbranch politics.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123425100781.
Data availability statement
Replication data for this article can be found in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/doi:10.7910/DVN/YPRKVC.
Acknowledgements
For valuable comments and suggestions on previous versions of this article, I would like to thank Amanda Driscoll, Holger Kern, Sivaram Cheruvu, Jeffrey Staton, Aidan Milliff, Daniel Brinks, Rachel Cichowski, Kai Ou, Dotan Haim, Quintin Beazer, Michael J. Nelson, Lydia B. Tiede, Christopher Reenock, Damian Boldt, Christopher Gahagan, Braeden McNulty, Harley Roe, and Qing Wang, as well as participants at the Global Law and Politics Conference (Emory University), the Southern Political Science Association (SPSA) Conference, the Integrated Colloquium (Florida State University), and the Seminar in Legal Philosophy and Political Theory (Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Argentina).
Financial support
None.
Competing interests
None.
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