RAPID: Building Judicial Legitimacy or Inviting Institutional Backlash?

民主取决于民意，但也取决于对最终由宪法规定的法治的服从。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月的总统选举无效，并指示在2017年10月下旬举行新的选举，这是对法院的制度合法性或为政体提供宪法和法律裁决的合法权力的关键考验。该项目考察了公众对这一具有里程碑意义的裁决以及法院下令进行的新选举的反应。根据这一具有里程碑意义的裁决，公民的种族和党派关系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，为最高法院建立一个合法性的储备？这些问题对于肯尼亚这样的新兴民主国家来说是非常重要的，因为肯尼亚高等法院的制度历史很短。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一个强有力的先例，不仅在肯尼亚，而且在整个非洲。此外，有争议的选举引发的大规模公众抗议和暴力的历史使得理解公众对这一事件的反应在理论、经验和规范方面都极为重要。该项目将测试以过程为基础（程序公平，对民主价值观的认同）和结果为基础（种族或党派对法院结果的分歧）的制度合法性模型为中心的理论假设。这些假设是通过两波全国小组调查得出的，其中包括对肯尼亚公民的调查实验。将利用第一波控制组答复者的样本，产生与合法性和其他法院有关的评估有关的描述性统计数据，并审查基于过程和结果的因素对合法性和其他评估的影响。还将进行一项实地实验，以确定程序公平和精英线索的因果关系，两者都与最高法院合法性的种族党派偏好相抵消或一致。该实验还将检验程序公平和抵消精英线索是否可以减轻合法性判断中的种族党派偏见。最后，第二波调查将允许确定不同种族党派对最高法院的态度如何随着新选举的结果而变化。检查这些变化将为基于结果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？我们的决定将持续到未来。该奖项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知识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.