Court-Curbing and Public Trust in Judiciary: Evidence from Turkey

We see that elected populist governments try to limit the judicial power by using different formal and informal court-curbing mechanisms. Despite the prevalence of these types of interbranch attacks, we do not know whether different types of court-curbing practices impact public trust in the judiciary differently. Taking these facts as point of departure, in this study we aim to explain 1) whether different court-curbing practices affect public confidence in the judiciary differently; 2) how populists’ justifications for institutional attacks affect citizens’ attitudes towards the judiciary; and 3) how do individual characteristics (such as partisanship or prior commitments to judicial institutions or democratic values) condition public responses to (1) and (2).In order to answer these three research questions, we have conducted a field national survey experiment in Turkey with 1200 respondents. Our experimental vignettes inform randomly assigned respondents of a governmental effort to pack the constitutional court and offer a number of justifications to motivate this reform. Following the vignette, we measure the respondents’ support for courts to estimate the causal effect of governmental court-curbing and their populist rhetoric on public support of judicial institutions.