How does Court-Curbing affect Public Trust in the Judiciary?

Public trust in the judiciary is a crucial component of judicial legitimacy without which the functioning of the legal system would be harmed. Alongside the rise of populism, in the past two decades public trust in the judiciary is under threat. Populist governments attempt to weaken the judiciary by using different formal and informal court-curbing mechanisms. Despite the increased scholarly attention on public support for courts and their reaction to court-curbing proposals, the existing studies are limited to single country analyses or a few and limited cross-country comparisons at best. Focusing on large number of panel of countries and a long time period, in this paper we aim to empirically show 1) whether different court-curbing practices affect public confidence in the judiciary differently; and 2) how do individual characteristics such as partisanship condition public responses to (1). Our key argument is that while formal court-curbing practices will affect public confidence in the judiciary negatively only in the long-run, the negative effects of informal court-curbing practices will appear in the short term. Moreover, we argue that the effect of the government’s court-curbing practices is moderated by the political alignment of the individuals. In other words, while court-curbing will erode opposition party supporters’ trust in the judiciary, yet it will not affect the government supporters’ trust in the judiciary. We test our hypotheses across 60 countries by using World Values Survey (1990-2023) and V-Dem data sets (1990-2023).