Public support for the US Supreme Court has been trending downward for more than a decade. High-profile decisions and hotly contested nominations have drawn the Court into our polarized politics. Recently, some justices have spent considerable time and energy giving interviews, speeches, and the like, assuring the public that the Court is an apolitical, neutral arbiter of disputes, distinct from the “political” branches. In this context, we turn to an understudied potential source of judicial legitimacy: the off-bench public rhetoric of Supreme Court justices. In this article, we present evidence from three original survey experiments to argue that Supreme Court justices’ off-bench rhetoric can powerfully influence public perceptions of the Court’s institutional legitimacy. Furthermore, these studies show that performance approval is key to changes in legitimacy: respondents who disapprove of a Court decision were immune to the effects of justices’ rhetoric.

中文翻译：

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最高法院大法官公开言论对司法合法性认知影响的实验研究

十多年来，公众对美国最高法院的支持一直呈下降趋势。备受瞩目的决定和激烈竞争的提名已将法院卷入我们两极分化的政治中。最近，一些法官花费了大量的时间和精力进行采访、演讲等，向公众保证法院是一个非政治的、中立的争端仲裁者，不同于“政治”部门。在这种情况下，我们转向一个未被充分研究的司法合法性的潜在来源：最高法院法官的场外公开言论。在本文中，我们提供了来自三个原始调查实验的证据，以证明最高法院大法官的场外言论可以有力地影响公众对法院制度合法性的看法。此外，