The Supreme Who?

Two-thirds of Americans can't name a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, according to a survey reported, among other places, here.

You'd think after the big Obamacare decision people could do better, but apparently not.  I've written a lot about what people know about the Supreme Court and I don't want to dig into that today, but there are some methodological issues, at least in the past, with how the questions were asked and the responses coded. 

The problem here is I can't easily track down much of the methodology, other than it was a national survey of 1,000 respondents.  My guess?  It's an open-ended question and those generally produce meager results anyway, at least compared to close-ended (multiple choice) questions.  Plus folks who get their news mostly from TV do a terrible job at open-ended questions (or so says a certain brilliant manuscript now under review at a major academic journal).

So only 34 percent could name a justice, and among those the winner is Roberts and the loser is Breyer.  See below.

• John Roberts – 20%
• Antonin Scalia – 16%
• Clarence Thomas – 16%
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg – 13%
• Sonia Sotomayor – 13%
• Anthony Kennedy – 10%
• Samuel Alito – 5%
• Elena Kagan – 4%
• Stephen Breyer – 3%

Campaign Finance Limits -- Killed

The U.S. Supreme Court just overturned a law that keeps corporations from using money to pay for campaign ads.  NYTimes story here.  Pdf of decision here.

Why connect this to a blog about political knowledge and what people know?

As I've discussed a length, as people flee news in a preference for more entertaining fare, it becomes more difficult to inform them of the issues of the day, or those in a political campaign.  Advertising, therefore, becomes even more important in "informing" voters, and now with this decision, corporations can flood the airwaves with advertising to swing elections.  A more misinformed voter is certain to emerge.  The Supreme Court's take may be legally correct here, but the outcome is not going to be as pretty as one might hope.

Supreme Court and Political Speech

There's a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that no matter how it is decided, will influence what people know about candidates and campaigns -- in particular the craziness every four years that is presidential politics.

The court meets today for arguments.  Here's one place for a quick backgrounder about Hillary: The Movie and the case.

Do campaign finance laws cover a movie like this one?  I suspect the lines are so blurred that a movie is an advertisement is ... whatever.  I think the Court will dodge this one. Typically the courts give commercial speech less protection than political speech, but what about when a non-profit or commercial enterprise engages in political speech?  I have a feeling the Court will strike down most, if not all, of campaign finance laws and the result will strongly influence future presidential campaigns.    What people know about presidential candidates is already a function of political advertising, but once the spigot is opened, who knows what the end result may be. 

Some fear corporations dominating the airwaves with their money.  Others argue corporations deserve the same First Amendment rights as individuals.  This is where it gets interesting, because an original intent conservative judge might argue that the First Amendment was only intended to protect people, not companies, therefore campaign finance laws must stand.  But as if often the case, original intent folks will quickly forget their focus on original intent when ideology gets in the way.  That'll happen again this time in what will probably be a 5-4 vote to stomp campaign finance reform into mush.

Judge Souter and Civics Knowledge

Retired U.S. Supreme Court justice David Souter warned that a lack of civics knowledge poses a threat. Versions of the story all over the Net. An AP version here.

Polls show two-thirds of Americans can't name all three branches of government. "This is something to worry about," Souter said "There is a danger to judicial independence when people have no understanding of how the judiciary fits into the constitutional scheme."

He's absolutely right, of course. The stability of a democratic government relies in part on a reservoir of good will by the public. When government screws up (which is often), it draws down the reservoir. When things go well, it gets replenished. But it's important people understand why the courts can make certain decisions, even if they don't agree with them politically or ideologically. Understanding the role of the courts is vital.

Sotomayor

What do people know about Obama's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court? A little, enough at least to offer an opinion. About one-in-five were "unsure" in offering an opinion about Sonia Sotomayor, according to one national poll. Only about a quarter of all polled had a negative opinion of her -- hardly good news for the GOPers hoping to challenge her nomination to the high court.

But here's some good news if you're Rush Limbaugh -- yes the Dems like her, yes Republicans don't (big surprise), but among self-described "Independents" a quarter of them had a negative opinion. That's kinda interesting and it leaves a window of opportunity for the Hannities of the world to define her as they see fit.

Painting her as a racist is going to be interesting given the people waving the paint brush (Limbaugh, Gingrich, et. al). Irony, much? You want racism, look at our chief justice's history. But I doubt that'll come up on Fox News.

Anyway, the numbers suggest this may not be the slam dunk the Obama folks hoped for. If I were betting then I'd place serious money on her getting through, but there may be a little blood in the water and the sharks are starting to get a bit frenzied. And don't ya know the cable news talking heads will froth at the mouth.

Knowledge about the Supreme Court

I've blogged a number of times about problems the American National Election Studies had in how they coded certain of their political knowledge questions. This came up because some scholars studying people's knowledge of the U.S. Supreme Court or its justices found inconsistencies in the ANES data, at least that didn't match what their own data showed. There's a good ANES report on just this problem.

Now the study these scholars was working on has been published. Below is a key graph describing some of the coding problems. It's worth a read for the methodologically inclined:

But these are not the only limitations plaguing this approach to measuring political knowledge. Most worrisome, in one instance, the ANES required its interviewers to code the accuracy of the respondents’ answers to the knowledge question during the interview itself, apparently using quite stringent criteria. Thus, if one replies that William Rehnquist is ‘‘the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court,’’ the interviewer would, according to ANES coding rules, record the answer as ‘‘correct’’ (even though the official title of the leader of the Court is the ‘‘Chief Justice of the United States’’). Also according to the ANES rules, references to Rehnquist as a Supreme Court judge who is the head honcho or main guy or the main one are scored as incorrect. According to these strict procedures, only 10.5% of the respondents ‘‘correctly’’ identified Rehnquist in the 2000 ANES.

Basically the open-ended responses were miscoded, or coded too strictly, or at times not even accurately when considering the official title of the chief justice. This affects a small but significant number of responses, which in turn can influence not only our evaluations of what people know about the Supreme Court but the consequences of that knowledge when examining its relationship with other variables. For example, the authors examine the role knowledge has in institutional loyalty.

Ultimately, they write:

But we do assert that the image of the American people as entirely bereft of information about courts, as ignorant of their role in the American democracy and their importance as makers of public policy, and as oblivious to the nature of judicial institutions and processes, most likely undercredits ordinary people.

In other words, the "Just How Stupid Are We" question becomes "Just How Stupid is Our Methodology?" In defense of ANES, they are working hard to repair the miscoding of previous data sets (these guys do great work) and in the latest 2008 pre- and post-election release the knowledge items are not even available yet (which is kinda pissing me off given that I need them for some work I'm doing). So the Pelosi, Cheney, Brown, and Roberts identification codes all are listed as -3, as in "we dunno yet, but we're working on it." I figure we'll see 'em sometime later this summer.

ANES and Knowledge

Quite some time back I blogged about problems in how the American National Election Studies coded responses to their political knowledge questions, a situation uncovered by a couple of scholars doing work on what people know about the U.S. Supreme Court.

A new report discusses these problems (a longer journal article is forthcoming). For those who rely on secondary data in general and ANES data in particular to examine political knowledge, this brief report is worth the read. The problem comes down to this -- coding for wrong answers included ones that should have been categorized as correct. In asking what office does William Rhenquist hold (he was chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court at the time), listed as wrong were such responses as "supreme court justice head honcho" and "supreme court justice, head." Should have been listed as correct.

To their credit, the fine folks at ANES have worked hard to understand and address the problem, even providing access to open-ended materials so people can more dutifully check whether a political knowledge answer is indeed incorrect.

All of us should appreciate the work of the report authors, James L. Gibson and Gregory A. Caldeira.

Knowing the Court

When looking at what people know, we can explore lots of areas. The usual one is public affairs, but it's also important to understand what people know about lots of other domains.

For example, the courts. In particular, the U.S. Supreme Court. The author puts it well:

Two of the findings of this research run strongly counter to existing understandings of public knowledge of law and courts. First, these respondents demonstrate relatively high levels of information about the Supreme Court. To our knowledge, few prior studies have documented this level of information about the Court. We contend that this finding is in part a function of the method by which knowledge is measured, and we are consequently critical of most earlier efforts to document what citizens know about the Supreme Court. When citizens are asked reasonable questions about what they understand about the Supreme Court, most can answer accurately.

As I've mentioned before, it's often how we measure knowledge that matters most. Previous surveys and studies done by damn smart people tend to overestimate the public's lack of knowledge because of the way we ask questions.

In conclusion, the author writes:

Certainly there is little in these data to suggest that the views of the American citizenry are too ill-informed to be worthy of any serious consideration, both from the political process and from scholars of the judiciary. It seems that the American people may know enough about law and courts to be able to perform their assigned function as constituents of the contemporary judicial system in the U.S.

I would note that the data suggest a small decline in accuracy about the Supreme Court from 2001 to 2005. About 74 percent in 2001 correctly knew justices are appointed. About 65 percent knew it in 2005. Same is true for a couple of other knowledge questions.

And the old recognition versus recall issue is seen, with recognition proving superior at tapping what people know about the Court. I won't go into the r vs r debate. See my other posts.

What's missing here, for me, is media. I'd love to see how people to watch a lot of court programs or the news differ in these results. Alas, this is not to be seen.

A summary to the study is here. Scroll down and click any option to get a pdf of the study.