Testing a Prospect Theory Model of Support for Change to the Supreme Court

Abstract

This paper explores public support for proposed changes to the Supreme Court through the lens of Prospect Theory. Two experiments on the 2019 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) investigate how individuals think about retrospective benefits and future risks posed by Supreme Court decision making. The first experiment indicates that measures of perceived personal and societal benefit from Court outputs are significantly influenced by the relevant time frame respondents are asked to consider (past 75 vs. past 15 years), respondents’ political partisanship, and the interaction between them. The second experiment indicates that prospective risks are significantly affected by question wording, partisanship, and an interaction between respondents’ partisanship and the relevant time frame, such that, Republicans expect more benefits in the short term and greater losses over longer periods; those expectations reverse for respondents who not identify as Republicans. Regression analyses demonstrate that using retrospective benefits as a proxy for determining if someone is in the domain of gains or losses generally does not yield significant findings with respect to support for change to the Supreme Court. Conceptualizing risk domains in terms of the expectation of future gains and losses, however, does yield significant effects in a manner consistent with prospect theory.

Keywords: Prospect Theory, Supreme Court, Institutional Change