How Do the Images and Audio from Public Hearings Impact High Courts’ Legitimacy?

Research shows that judges express their underlying political preferences when speaking that can only be captured with audio and not text. Yet, there is little evidence to suggest that audio recordings are more, nor less, detrimental to courts’ legitimacy than written transcripts. First, using a nationally representative sample of Americans, we show that when individuals read the written transcripts from a case they are not more likely to grant the U.S. Supreme Court legitimacy than individuals that hear the dialogue from the same case. Second, we show among a nationally representative sample in the UK that Brits are not more or less likely to view the nation’s high court as legitimate when they read, hear, or view the proceedings. We highlight that the results are not driven by the similarity between judges’ and participants’ preferences. The findings have important implications for how national high courts interact with the public and communicate their decisions.