Ben Johnson (Penn State Law School (University Park) & Logan Strother (Purdue University - Department of Political Science, Syracuse University) have posted Does the Supreme Court Respond to Public Opinion? on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
A large body of literature asks whether the Supreme Court responds to public opinion. Most studies report significant judicial responsiveness to public preferences under some varying conditions. In this paper we show, contrary to prevailing belief, that there is actually no consensus in the literature that the Court is responsive. More importantly, we demonstrate there is no evidence of a meaningful relationship between public opinion and Supreme Court outputs in more than 50 years. The typical finding of a relationship is driven entirely by a correlation between liberal mood and liberal outputs during the Warren Court era.
Very interesting and highly recommended. I'm not qualified to comment on the data and methodology, but the core claim of the article is intuitively plausible.
