RAPID: Building Judicial Legitimacy or Inviting Institutional Backlash?

RAPID：建立司法合法性还是招致机构强烈反对？

• 批准号: 1801207
• 负责人: Eric Kramon
• 金额: $ 16.39万
• 依托单位: George Washington University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-03-15 至 2019-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1801207&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RAPID; Building; Judicial; Legitimacy; Inviting

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.

民主取决于流行的意志，但也要服从宪法最终规定的法律规则。高等法院被要求为宪法意义的最终仲裁者。肯尼亚最高法院对2017年8月总统大选的无效和2017年10月下旬举行的新选举的指令提出了对法院机构合法性的关键考验，或者应有应有的权力来执行政体的宪法和法律裁决。该项目研究了公众如何回应这一具有里程碑意义的裁决，以及法院下令的新选举。鉴于这一具有里程碑意义的裁决，公民的族裔和党派隶属关系是否会推动最高法院合法性的评估？还是对程序公平性和其他非政策因素的看法可以克服种族或党派偏见，并为法院建立合法性的储藏吗？这些问题在像肯尼亚这样的新兴民主制度中非常重要，高等法院的制度历史很短。群众和精英对法院行动的回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，而且在非洲的情况下。此外，对有争议的选举的大规模公共抗议和暴力历史使公众对这一事件的回应对于理论，经验和规范性原因极为重要。 该项目将检验以基于过程的（程序公平性，对民主价值观的订阅）与基于结果的（与法院成果分歧）模型的理论假设。这些假设通过两波国家小组调查，其中包括肯尼亚公民的调查实验。使用与第一波的对照组受访者的过度样本，将生成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，并研究基于过程和基于结果的因素对合法性和其他评估的影响。还将进行实地实验，以允许识别程序公平性和精英提示的因果关系，并与最高法院合法性相抵触和与民族党派偏好保持一致。该实验还将检查程序公平性和反复窃听的精英提示是否可以减轻合法性判断中的民族偏见。最后，第二次浪潮调查将允许确定不同的民族党派对最高法院的态度如何根据新选举的结果改变。 检查这些变化将为基于结果的模型提供额外的测试，并检查法院对法院的决定（正面和负面）的反应如何以及是否持续到未来。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并认为值得通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响审查标准通过评估来获得支持。