Support for the US Supreme Court after a sudden vacancy.

What is it about?

Using a fortuitously timed survey, and an experiment embedded in the second wave, I asked the same individuals about their support for the Court shortly before and shortly after the unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia. An unexpected vacancy doesn't necessarily influence support for the institution; surprisingly, nor does priming the political importance of filling the vacancy. But, when framed as legally important, and when accompanied by potent judicial symbols, people increase diffuse support and decrease perceptions of how political the Court is. This is different for Democrats (who expected to be policy "winners") than Republicans (policy "losers").

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Why is it important?

This article is important for two reasons. First, to my knowledge, these are the only data that capture individual attitudes before and after a vacancy, but before a nomination. Thus, the pre-nomination frames to which people are exposed -- legal and political -- are more abstract than in other, post-nomination contexts (e.g., judiciousness v. ideology frames). Second, it shows that support for the Court might be protected from attempts by the elected branches to use the Court as a pawn in the political game. Across no conditions did support for the Court decrease. Elected branches cannot capitalize on vacancy related uncertainty to harm the Court and promote other, non-vacancy related institutional alterations.