Populist Frames and Judicial Legitimacy: Survey Experiment in Czech Republic

Students of comparative law have for long suggested that attempts by the elected leaders to undermine the independence of the judiciary will be electorally costly. The widely shared norms on the inappropriateness of interfering with the judiciary would thus sustain the institutional checks and balances and the institutions of constitutionalism. The ascent of electoral populism, however, indicates that an alternative account might be more realistic regarding the politicians' expectations on costs and benefits of court-curbing. While we do seem to have increasing evidence of the effects of partisanship, particularly in the context of the United States, we know little about whether the global rise in populism has enabled discourses that provide voters templates of interpretation that justify populists' attempts to disable the judiciary. There are good reasons to think that that is the case. Populists ground their rhetoric in juxtaposing the "people" against the "corrupt elite", creating a normative tension with the ideas of a liberal-democratic process where elected powers are checked to limit the state's interference with individual rights. To test whether one observes the effects of partisanship and procedural fairness on voters' perceptions of the courts outside of the U.S. context, and to assess whether populist messages produce comparable effects, a survey experiment is conducted in the context of the Czech Republic, a country that until recently has had both a populist executive and a strong and independent Constitutional Court. By embedding populist messages within experimental survey vignettes and collecting citizens' perceptions of the highest court of the Czech Republic, the study aims to assess how such messages affect the legitimacy of judicial institutions. It also seeks to probe what factors moderate the relationship between exposure to such messages and legitimacy attitudes and register the expected moderating effects of education, economic class, and populist attitudes.