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遵守。高等法院被要求成为宪法意义上的最终仲裁者。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，这是对法院机构合法性或为政体做出宪法和法律的裁决的合法权力的关键考验。这个项目研究了公众如何回应这一具有里程碑意义的裁决，以及法院下令进行的新选举。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，对程序公正的看法和其他非政策因素能否克服种族或党派偏见，为法院建立合法性储备？这些问题在肯尼亚这样的新兴民主国家非常重要，肯尼亚的高等法院的制度历史很短。群众和精英对法院行动的反应将不仅在肯尼亚，而且在整个非洲，为法治和民主治理的未来树立一个强有力的先例。此外，历史上的大规模公众抗议和暴力，以应对有争议的选举，使理解公众对这一事件的反应非常重要的理论，经验和规范的原因。 该项目将测试理论假设集中在基于过程（程序公平，订阅民主价值观）与基于结果（种族或党派与法院结果的分歧）的制度合法性模型。这些假设与两波全国小组调查，其中包括一个调查实验，肯尼亚公民。将使用第一波中对照组答卷人的超额样本，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，并审查基于过程和成果的因素对合法性和其他评价的影响。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影响，这两种影响既抵消又符合种族党派对最高法院合法性的偏好。该实验还将研究程序公平和抵消精英线索是否可以削弱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的民族党派对最高法院的态度如何根据新的选举结果发生变化。 检查这些变化将提供一个额外的测试结果为基础的模型，并检查如何以及是否反应（积极和消极）的法院？该奖项反映了NSF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.