Has the Supreme Court become just another political branch? Public perceptions of Court approval and legitimacy in a post-Dobbs world

Have perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court polarized, much like the rest of American politics? Because of the Court’s unique role, for many years it remained one of the few institutions respected by both Democrats and Republicans alike. But the Court’s dramatic shift to the right in recent years—highlighted by its Dobbs decision in 2022—potentially upends that logic. Using both 8 waves of panel data and 18 nationally representative surveys spanning two decades, we show that while there was little evidence of partisan polarization in earlier years, in 2022 and 2023, such patterns are clear in favorability, trust, legitimacy, and support for reform. Factors that used to protect the Court—like knowledge about it and support for key democratic values—no longer do so. The Court has also become more important to voters, and will likely remain a political flashpoint, with disquieting implications for the Court’s place in our polity., , , # Has the Supreme Court become just another political branch? Public perceptions of Court approval and legitimacy in a post-*Dobbs* world

## Description of the data and file structure

**Figure 1:** Data for Figure 1 comes from publicly available Gallup data:

Supreme Court:

Congress:

Executive Branch:

This figure can be replicated using the **Figure1_Gallup_Trust.R** script and the **Figure1_Gallup_Trust.csv** data.

**Figure 2:** Data for Figure 2 comes from a content analysis of *The New York Times* coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court. To produce those results, we used the *New York Times* API, we first downloaded the corpus of news articles from 1 January 2008 – 20 June 2023 (the last date available at the time we performed our content analysis) that included the words “Supreme Court” as a keyword for the article. This proceeds in two steps. The API does not return the full text but does return the full-text URL, so we used the API to generate the set of URLs, and then used ...