RAPID: Building Judicial Legitimacy or Inviting Institutional Backlash?

民主取决于民众意愿，但也取决于对宪法最终规定的法治的服从。高等法院被要求成为宪法意义的最终仲裁者。肯尼亚最高法院宣布2017年8月总统选举无效，并指示在2017年10月下旬举行新的选举，这对该法院的机构合法性或为政体做出宪法和法律裁决的正当权威构成了关键考验。本项目调查公众对这一里程碑式的裁决以及法院下令举行的新选举的反应。鉴于这一里程碑式的裁决，公民的种族和党派背景是否推动了他们对最高法院合法性的评估？或者，对程序公平和其他非政策因素的看法能否克服种族或党派偏见，为最高法院建立合法性的蓄水池？这些问题在肯尼亚这样的新兴民主国家非常重要，因为肯尼亚的最高法院制度历史较短。大众和精英对法院行动的反应将为法治和民主治理的未来树立强有力的先例，不仅在肯尼亚，而且在整个非洲。此外，大规模公众抗议和暴力应对有争议的选举的历史使了解公众对这一事件的反应具有极其重要的理论、经验和规范方面的原因。这个项目将测试以程序为基础(程序公平，对民主价值观的认同)和以结果为基础(种族或党派与法院结果不一致)的机构合法性模式为中心的理论假设。这些假设与一项对肯尼亚公民进行的两波国家小组调查相结合，其中包括一项调查实验。利用第一波调查中控制组答复者的过抽样，将产生与合法性和其他与法院有关的评估有关的描述性统计数据，并审查基于程序和结果的因素对合法性和其他评估的影响。还将进行实地试验，以确定程序公平和精英线索对最高法院合法性的因果影响，这既与民族工匠的偏好相反，也与民族工匠的偏好一致。这项实验还将检验程序公平和反补贴精英线索是否可以减弱合法性判断中的种族偏见。最后，第二波调查将允许确定不同的种族党派对最高法院的态度如何随着新选举的结果而改变。审查这些变化将为以结果为基础的模型提供额外的测试，并检查对法院的反应(积极和消极)如何以及是否会持续到未来？S的裁决反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Democracy depends on popular will but also obedience to a rule of law ultimately prescribed by the Constitution. High courts are called on to be final arbiters of constitutional meaning. The Kenyan Supreme Court's invalidation of the August 2017 presidential election and directive for a new election in late October 2017 presents a crucial test of the Court's institutional legitimacy, or rightful authority to render constitutional and legal rulings for the polity. This project examines how the public has responded to this landmark ruling, as well as to the new election that the Court has ordered. Do citizens' ethnic and partisan affiliations drive their assessments of the Supreme Court's legitimacy in light of this landmark ruling? Or can perceptions of procedural fairness and other non-policy factors overcome ethnic or partisan bias and build a reservoir of legitimacy for the Court? These questions are incredibly important in an emerging democracy like Kenya with a high court that has a short institutional history. Mass and elite responses to the Court's actions will set a strong precedent for the future of the rule of law and democratic governance, not only in Kenya but in Africa writ large. Moreover, a history of mass public protests and violence in response to controversial elections makes understanding the public's response to this episode extremely important for theoretical, empirical, and normative reasons. This project will test theoretical hypotheses centered on process-based (procedural fairness, subscription to democratic values) versus outcome-based (ethnic or partisan disagreement with Court outcomes) models of institutional legitimacy. These hypotheses with a two-wave national panel survey, which includes a survey experiment, of Kenyan citizens. Using an oversample of control group respondents from the first wave, descriptive statistics related to legitimacy and other Court-related assessments and examine the effects of process and outcome-based factors on legitimacy and other evaluations will be generated. A field experiment will also be conducted to allow identification of the causal effects of procedural fairness and elite cues, both countervailing and aligning with ethnopartisan preferences' on Supreme Court legitimacy. The experiment will also examine whether procedural fairness and countervailing elite cues can attenuate ethnopartisan bias in legitimacy judgments. Finally, the second wave survey will allow the identification of how different ethno-partisans' attitudes toward the Supreme Court change in light of the outcome of the new election. Examining these changes will provide an additional test of the outcome-based model and examine how and whether reactions (both positive and negative) to the court?s decision persist into the future.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.