RAPID: The Dynamics of Minority Support for the Supreme Court.

公众对最高法院的信任对美国民主的健康至关重要。然而，最近的争议给法院的合法性带来了前所未有的挑战。由于对最高法院的信任处于历史低点，最近的研究表明，最高法院的合法性可能比以前认为的更加脆弱，评论人士和学者们都提出了越来越严重的警告，即最高法院在重大案件中的裁决有可能侵蚀其公众支持的基础。然而，在这场关于最高法院公众地位的日益激烈的讨论中，基本上没有考虑到美国少数族裔的观点。因此，目前尚不清楚少数民族公民是否继续高度尊重法院，以及法院的裁决对这种支持有什么影响（如果有的话）。为了探索少数民族公民对最高法院的支持动态，该项目将采用调查研究和精英访谈相结合的方法。一项具有全国代表性的美国人调查将深入了解公众对最高法院的支持状况，对非裔美国人、西班牙裔美国人和印第安人进行抽样调查，以便详细分析法院在少数民族公民中的地位。为了了解法院重大判决对少数民族公民对法院看法的影响，该项目将进一步关注美洲原住民的态度。为此，该项目将以两种方式利用法院预计将于2023年对一个备受瞩目的案件作出的裁决。首先，在法院作出裁决后，将与印第安人调查受访者进行第二轮调查，从而提供一个机会来评估裁决对法院在受该裁决最直接影响的人群中的支持的影响。其次，在最高法院作出裁决前后对美洲土著部落领导人进行采访，将有助于深入了解该裁决对少数民族社区政治领导人观点的影响。这项研究的结果将为在美国政治的关键时刻，最高法院与少数族裔的关系提供重要的见解。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。

Public trust in the Supreme Court is vital for the health of American democracy. Recent controversies, however, have brought unprecedented challenges to the Court’s legitimacy. With trust in the Court at historic lows and recent research suggesting the Court’s legitimacy may be more fragile than previously thought, commentators and scholars alike are raising increasingly dire warnings that the Court’s decisions in highly salient cases have the potential to erode its foundation of public support. Largely missing from this growing discussion of the Court’s public standing, however, is the perspective of the country’s racial and ethnic minorities. As a result, it is unclear whether minority citizens continue to hold the Court in high regard and what impact, if any, the Court’s decisions have on that support. To explore the dynamics of support for the Supreme Court among minority citizens, the project will employ a combination of survey research and elite interviews. A nationally-representative survey of Americans will provide insights into the state of public support for the Supreme Court, with an oversampling of African-American, Hispanic, and Native American respondents allowing for detailed analyses of the Court’s standing among minority citizens. To understand the effect of a significant Court decision on minority citizens’ views of the Court, the project will further focus on the attitudes of Native Americans. To do so, the project will leverage the Court’s anticipated 2023 ruling in a high-profile case in two ways. First, Native American survey respondents will be re-contacted after the Court’s decision with a second wave of the survey, thereby providing an opportunity to evaluate the impact of the ruling on the Court’s support among those most directly affected by the decision. Second, interviews with leaders of Native American tribes both before and after the Court’s decision will grant insights into the ruling’s impact on the views of minority communities’ political leaders. The findings from this research will yield important insights into the Supreme Court’s relationship with minorities at this critical juncture in American politics.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.