This study examines whether perceptions of Supreme Court decisions differ between men and women. It splits the data from an original experiment into separate models for male and female respondents. The original study found that unanimous decisions and adherence to precedence increased public agreement with decisions. This study hypothesizes that women will be less swayed than men by decision attributes like coalition size in abortion cases, as abortion is more ideologically salient for women. It is also hypothesized that men and women will respond similarly to prayer and bankruptcy cases, which have lower ideological salience. The study aims to further understand how gender influences views of Court legitimacy and decision support.

1. “Public Opinion: Exploring Gender Differences of Court Opinions”
Gabrielle Lee, Jaden Powell, Jonah Ragsdale, Yujin Seo
Legitimacy is an essential criterion for courts, in that decisions consistently grounded in legal, neutral frameworks
will affect the public’s attitudes towards the institution’s ability to run effectively. Two factors that engage with
institutional legitimacy and help signal judicial neutrality—size of majority coalition and the treatment of
precedent—have been measured in Zink, Spriggs, and Scott’s study, “Courting the Public: The Influence of
Decision Attributes on Individuals’ Views of Court Opinions.” This data demonstrates that when a Court generates
a unanimous decision coalition and adheres to precedence, individuals are more likely to agree with and accept a
decision, even if their ideological predispositions contrast with the outcome. While the study’s data suggests the
importance of legitimacy in shaping public attitudes, the influential nature of this criteria is evident in an even
broader context. We use their existing experimental design to assess the demographic factor of gender. We seek to
find whether the effects of different treatments of precedence and majority coalition size vary across male and
female respondents. By splitting the data of respondents and running two separate models specifying between male
and female, we test whether there are gendered differences in acceptance of decisions for cases of abortion, prayer,
and bankruptcy. Our method allows us to further assess how individuals form opinions about Supreme Court
decisions. Our data shows that while men and women have some ideological differences, their view of court
opinions hardly differ. With the exception of abortion, there is very little to suggest gender is a determining factor of
decision support in the cases we studied. We propose that this is due to the difference in the degree of ideological
salience for each of the legal issues presented.
The original study, “Courting the Public: The Influence of Decision Attributes on
Individuals’ Views of Court Opinions,” by Zink, Spriggs, and Scott focuses on perceived
legitimacy of Supreme Court decisions based on coalition size and precedence treatment. The
original study finds that these two decision traits have a marked effect on individuals’ agreement
with Court decisions and thus on the legitimacy of the Court. This study supplements the existing
literature that discusses how individuals respond to Court decisions, and is valuable because the
public's attitude toward the Supreme Court affects the institution's long term legitimacy. Data
that surveys male and female respondents together overlooks differences in gender policy
preferences and fails to account for important information regarding the effects of gender on
perceived legitimacy of Supreme Court decisions. Thus, the addition to the original study is the
examination of genders individually from the existing model.
1

2.
To test the attributes of judicial decisions, the original study tested responses to three
legal issues decided on by the Court: abortion, school prayer, and bankruptcy. The authors chose
these three issues based on ideological salience assuming that abortion has the highest salience,
school prayer has slightly less, and bankruptcy has the least. We formulate our hypotheses about
the difference in responses between men and women based upon these ideas of ideological
salience.
There is a wealth of research that chronicles gender differences in political attitudes and
preferences. For instance, women are more likely than men to support “compassion” issues such
as social welfare, education, healthcare, and programs to assist the poor. Women are less likely
to endorse domestic and international issues that involve the use of force; women, in comparison
to men, are less supportive of capital punishment, military interventions, and defense spending,
but are more supportive of gun control laws (Eichenberg 2003). Conversely, women and men are
generally like­minded on questions of abortion, women’s rights, environmental issues,and civil
rights and civil liberties (Carol 2003). Because women and men behave in accordance to their
political attitudes, we believe gender may be a factor in their reactions to Court decisions.
Moreover, numerous studies show that the ability of the Court to influence public opinion
is decreased when a policy is of high ideological salience (Grosskopf and Mondak 1998;
Hoekstra 2003; Hoekstra and Segal 1996; Johnson and Martin 1998). ​C​ultural preferences, on
average, are simply more important to mass behavior than economic ones. Ellis and Stimson find
that issues of culture has more salience than issues of economics; preferences on cultural
2

3. issues—like abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, and the like—are more closely tied to core
values and to citizens’ personal identities than the appropriateness of government based solutions
to economic problems (Ellis and Stinson 2012). Furthermore, literature suggests that women and
men may consider these issues to be of varying levels of importance or salience. Women attach a
higher priority to social welfare issues than men do while men give greater priority to ​economic
and financial issues such as employment, the economy, and the federal budget deficit (​Gidengil
1995; Everitt 2002). Therefore, we reason that because women and men seem to differ in policy
priorities, coalition size and precedence treatment will affect men and women’s evaluations and
responses to Court decisions differently.
Looking at the social landscape in America, abortion appears to an issue of high
contention and is more ideologically salient. Though the studies aforementioned hold that there
is no significant difference between men and women regarding opinions on abortion, we
hypothesize that women, in comparison to men, consider abortion to be a more important issue,
and thus more ideologically salient because women are the recipients of abortions. Additionally,
women are more likely than men to fall into the extreme categories on abortion questions­­ never
allowing abortions or allowing abortions in all cases (Norrander 2008). Women’s fixed opinions
on abortion can be attributed to the fact that it is a more ideologically salient issue to them.
gender differences in political opinions depend on the relative importance that men and women
place on the various issues. We infer that because women consider abortion to be more
ideologically salient and have more fixed opinions on abortion, women will be less swayed by
coalition size or precedence treatment in Court decisions which leads us to our first hypothesis:
3

4. Hypothesis One: For Court decisions regarding abortion, women will respond less than men to
the manipulation of the coalition size and precedence treatment.
Looking at other issues decided on by the Supreme Court, we can make predictions about
how men and women respond to issues of less ideological salience. Relative to issues of
abortion, school prayer is less ideologically salient with a slightly lower ratio of moderate to
extremists with 46% as opposed to 49.5% (Zink, Spriggs, and Scott 2009). Though the ratio is
only slightly different for abortion and school prayer, we conclude that school prayer is less
ideologically salient due to its relatively small role in contemporary political debate. Thus we
can assume that men and women will not respond differently to Supreme Court decisions on
school prayer because it is a less ideologically salient issue that fails to stir up strong opinions.
From this, we find our second hypothesis.
Hypothesis Two: For Court decisions regarding prayer in school, men and women will respond
similarly to the manipulation of coalition size and precedence treatment.
A host of Supreme Court cases are based upon bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is of much less
ideological salience than abortion and prayer in schools with a 10.8% ratio of moderates to
extremists (Zink, Spriggs, and Scott 2009). Using the same logic as in our second hypothesis, we
assume that men and women will not respond differently to Court opinions regarding bankruptcy
because it is of little ideological salience people have less concrete opinions on the issue.
Hypothesis Three: For Court decisions regarding bankruptcy, men and women will have little
response to the manipulation of coalition size and precedence treatment.
4

5. DATA AND METHODS
We base our study off of the model created in the study conducted by Zink, Spriggs, and
Scott, “Courting the Public: The Influence of Decision Attributes on Individuals’ Views of Court
Opinions.” While gender was not addressed in their publication, the data set included the
variable “sex.” We added this variable to their existing experimental model in order to test
whether results vary across male and female respondents. We adopt their experimental design
and split the respondents’ results into two models delineating gender—male or female. In the
original experiment, Zink, Spriggs, and Scott manipulated two independent variables and
decision attributes: majority coalition and precedent treatment. The data reflected respondents’
opinions on cases of abortion, prayer, and bankruptcy. These three distinct issues were initially
selected for their variance in issue salience (Zink, Spriggs, and Scott 2009). Abortion—or
specifically the requirement of parental consent for minors—is of high salience, school
prayer—or the question of designated classroom time for voluntary prayer—is of moderate
salience, and bankruptcy—or the question of technical requirements for filing deadlines—is of
low salience. A 2 × 2 × 2 between­subjects design to produce eight experimental conditions, with
two conditions on ideological direction of case outcome (liberal or conservative), two on
majority coalition (unanimous or divided court), and two on precedent treatment (whether the
court overturned or followed existing precedent). Respondents, who consisted of 558
undergraduates in Political Science courses at the University of California, Davis, were randomly
assigned to the conditions using a Latin­square style randomization (Zink, Spriggs, and Scott
2009).
5

6. In the initial experiment, respondents received experimental manipulations through
vignettes of mock newspaper articles. The dependent variables came from their responses to the
questions, “do you agree or disagree with the Court’s decision in this case” (coded 1­5, strongly
disagree to strongly agree) and “do you accept the decision?” (coded 1 to 4, strongly believe it
should be challenged to strongly believe it should be accepted). For a control variable, a
pre­experimental questionnaire was administered that developed variables for diffuse support
and ideological predispositions (Zink, Spriggs, and Scott 2009). A regression and statistical
analyses examined the effect of the independent variable manipulations, which were categorized
according to respondents’ ex­ante support or opposition to the specific legal issue, on the two
dependent variables (level of agreement and willing to accept). (See Zink, Spriggs, and Scott
2009 study “Courting the Public: The Influence of Decision Attributes on Individuals’ Views of
Court Opinions” for an in­depth explanation of statistical methods).
The data showed that manipulations of decision attributes did affect respondents’
opinions about the case, and thus this data is satisfactory to build upon for our study. In our
tables, we use the ​Oppose­Unanimous­Follow​ as our baseline comparison group, and take the
new coefficients for only men and only women and compare them first to one another, and then
to the original model of combined sexes from Zink, Spriggs and Scott. In these tables, the
number in parenthesis is the standard error of that estimate. To determine statistical significance,
we must examine how big the coefficient estimate is compared to the standard error estimate. A
large standard error signifies a higher variability. Six tables of data were generated; we will
discuss the results of three of these tables in this paper, one for each of the legal issues evaluated
6

7. (abortion, school prayer, and bankruptcy), related to either the agreement or acceptance of the
decision.
RESULTS
The results are outlined in three separate tables representing the three separate court case
results from our experiment. Like the original experiment, our analysis shows the treatment
groups in relation to the baseline group of ​Unanimous­Follow​ for each ​ex­ante​ category (support
or oppose). However, we provide two additional columns expressing the individual effects of
gender for both male and female. For example, in Table 1, the result of Unanimous­Overrule for
women (­.25) showing ​ex­ante​ support means that women in our study are less likely to support
the decision than women in the baseline ​ex­ante ​support group given the court’s decision was
Unanimous­Follow​. We also keep the ideological predisposition and diffuse support analyses
which Zink, Spriggs, and Scott conclude is “consistently strong” across all three cases. After
examining gender, ideological predisposition remains a strong effect for both men and women
through all three cases. However, diffuse support is not consistently significant across the three
cases, meaning that while combined, support for these decisions impacts overall results, gender
does not always determine support or opposition.
TABLE 1 GOES HERE
Abortion: ​We start our results with the abortion decision as hypothesis one estimates a
variance in gender in this category of Court decisions. Examining ​ex­ante ​support for previous
court policy, we find that both men and women agree at significant levels for
Unanimous­overrule ​decisions. Women in the test group are less likely (coefficient: ­.25) than
women in the baseline group to support the decision while men are more likely to support the
7

8. court’s decision (coefficient: .37) than baseline men. This is crucial to our hypothesis as the
original analyses showed no signs of significance among the combined group (See Column 1).
Given the opposite direction of opinions among men and women, this explains why combined
there is a lack of evidence to support difference from the baseline group. For ​ex­ante ​support
among women, when the court becomes divided, there is no evidence to suggest a difference
from the baseline group regardless of whether the court followed or overruled precedent. Among
ex­ante​ support among men in a divided decision, only overruling precedent caused a difference
as they were less likely than the baseline men to support the decision (coefficient: ­.17).
Among ​ex­ante ​opposition we find two interesting results in the lack of reaction among
women, and a strong difference among men. In our new model, ​ex­ante ​opposition women are no
more likely to change their agreeance than the baseline group in all three treatments. This
contradicts the original analyses that together ​unanimous­overrule ​and ​divided­follow ​yielded
significant results. While in the combined results we find less support for the three treatment
groups, only the ​divided­follow​ treatment resulted in a negative coefficient (­.07) showing little
reaction to the court's decision given ​ex­ante ​opposition. What explains this variation for
combined results is a significant reaction by men, resulting in less support for the decision than
the baseline group in all three treatments. Regardless of divided or unanimous and follow or
overrule, men were less likely than the treatment group to support the decision by significant
amounts (coefficients: ­.58, ­.49, ­.46 respectively).​ ​It is interesting to note here that the
combined group was not significant, yet males differed significantly from the baseline group.
FIGURE 1 GOES HERE
8

9. When examining the abortion case, the difference in percentages of approvals between
women and men is different primarily when decisions are unanimous. Comparing ​ex­ante
support figures, the difference between strongly agree is vastly different when the court is
unanimous regardless of overruling or following precedent.
FIGURE 2 GOES HERE
Among women, Strong agreement is below 40%, while men strongly agree at a rate
above 40% when the court is unanimous and overrules precedent. Conversely, when the court is
unanimous and follows precedent, women strongly agree above 40%, while men strongly agree
only around 30%.
FIGURE 3 GOES HERE
When looking at percentages among ​ex­ante ​opposition however, the differences become
less apparent, and are more consistent from treatment to treatment. Under unanimous decisions,
women agree no differently from overruled or followed precedent, and change very little in
divided decisions, disagreeing strongly more when precedent is followed, and agreeing strongly
more when precedent is overruled by a few percent.
FIGURE 4 GOES HERE
With men in ​ex­ante ​opposition, percentage results are almost identical when the court is
divided regardless of followed or overruled precedent. The only noticeable difference is when
the court is unanimous and follows precedent, where men strongly agree and somewhat disagree
at much higher percentages than the other three treatments.
TABLE 2 GOES HERE
9

10. Bankruptcy: ​In the bankruptcy decisions, we once again find a difference among men
and women that leads to discrepancies in the original combined study. Given ​ex­ante​ support,
when the decision is both ​unanimous­overrule ​and ​divided­follow ​men are responsive at
significant levels, being more likely to agree (coefficient .44) and less likely to agree
(coefficient: ­.55) respectively. For women of the same treatments, our findings were not
significant in both cases, despite original significance when the court ruled ​divided­follow
(coefficient: ­.38). However, when the court is divided and overrules precedent, women are more
likely to disagree than the baseline group significantly (coefficient ­.59), while men do not. Once
again, the original combined results claim significance that isn’t present when comparing men to
baseline men.
Ex­ante opposition shows very little in differences in gender with the strong exception of
women when the decision is unanimous­overrule (coefficient: ­.44). In all three opposition
treatments, men did not differ from the baseline group, while women did not differ in both
divided court treatments. The combined results concluded a ​divided­overrule ​decision was
significant, bearing lower error, despite high error among the individual genders.
Diffuse support is significant in the original model, but found to be significant only for
women after breaking apart the genders (coefficient: .24). Men however, face higher error and do
not correspond with the original conclusion.
TABLE 3 GOES HERE
Prayer: ​Our findings among the prayer case differ the most from original results in
ex­ante ​support decisions. Despite significance in both ​unanimous­overrule ​and ​divided­follow​,
neither gender produced the same conclusion. However, men showed a strong difference in
10

11. divided­overrule ​decisions being less likely to agree with the baseline group (coefficient: ­.61).
Because women did not provide significance, the combined results failed to echo the significance
that only men concluded.
The ​ex­ante ​oppose results were the only consistency with the original results as none of
the coefficients were found to be significant, mainly due to high error. Among diffuse support,
only men produced significance, which was concluded in the combined statistics as well.
CONCLUSION
The results (shown in Table 1) confirm that for abortion, men and women showed
significant differences in opinion for different treatments of majority coalition size and
precedence. Specifically, this data shows that men were affected by manipulations of the
independent variables to a greater degree than women. In the original paper that pooled men and
women together, respondents were less likely overall to agree with the court decision on
abortion. However, now with the model that split the respondents by gender, we can see that the
treatment manipulation had no statistically significant effect on women. For men, on the other
hand, the effect is significantly negative. Therefore, men are reacting much more to the change in
precedent treatment. Similarly, looking at the subsequent treatment, where respondents opposed
the ultimate court decision, saw the court was divided, but saw the court followed precedent, this
difference holds. For men, the manipulation of precedent treatment had a greater, statistically
significant effect on their opinions than for women. For an ideologically salient issue like
abortion, men are more responsive to the court decision attributes than women. By pooling men
and women, the original model did not pick up on this difference. However, our results are
important in that our findings illustrate the influence of gender differences in opinions on certain
11

12. legal matters. Our result supports our first hypothesis that says women have more hardened
opinions on abortion than men, as men are more easily influenced by specific court processes
and manipulation of decision attributes that signal judicial neutrality, like adherence to
precedence and coalition size. As aforementioned, the result may be explained by the fact that
regulations on abortion directly affect women in comparison to men. While we cannot claim
causality, our finding seems reasonable because abortion is not only an ideologically salient
issue, but also an issue that has political, religious, medical, moral, and ethical implications
(among others). Furthermore, abortion has been a historically contentious issue that has been
consistently relevant over the course of recent judicial history.
The results for school prayer and bankruptcy support our hypothesis that the
manipulation of coalition size and precedence treatment will not have a significant effect. Our
findings support our reasoning that because these issues are of small ideological salience, they do
not invite strong opinions and thus create no difference of importance between men and women.
Because our study was based on the original study that did not take gender into account,
we were confined to the three issues of abortion, school prayer, and bankruptcy. While the three
legal issues are of varying ideological salience, they do not necessarily differ in salience in
regards to gender. Therefore, future studies could examine cases that question legal matters that
may be more divisive on gender lines, for instance other questions of reproductive health, equal
pay, homosexual marriage, etc. Such studies may be able to further illuminate implications of the
differences between men and women in their attitudes and opinions towards different legal issues
and Court decisions.
12

13. APPENDIX
Figure 1:
13

14. Figure 2:
Figure 3:
14

15. Figure 4:
15

16.
Works Cited
Carroll, Susan J. Women and American Politics New Questions, New Directions. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, 2003.
Eichenberg, Richard C. “Gender Differences in Public Attitudes toward the Use of Force by the
United States, 1990­2003.” ​International Security ​28.1 (2003) : 126­127. Online.
Ellis, Christopher, and James A. Stimson. ​Ideology in America​. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012. Online.​Grosskopf, Anke, and Jeffery J. Mondak. “Do Attitudes Toward
Specific Supreme Court Decisions Matter? The Impact of ​Webster ​and ​Texas v. Johnson ​on
Public Confidence in the Supreme Court.” ​Political Research Quarterly​ 51 (1998): 633­54.
Online.
Hoekstra, Valerie J. ​Public Reactions to Supreme Court Decisions. ​New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2003. Online.
Hoekstra, Valerie J., and Jeffery A. Segal. “The Sheperding of Local Public Opinion: The
Supreme Court and ​Lamb’s Chapel.​” ​Journal of Politics ​58 (1996) : 1079­1102. Online.
16

17. Johnson, Timothy R., and Andrew D. Martin. “The Public’s Conditional Response to Supreme
Court Decisions.” ​American Political Science Review​ 92.2 (1998): 299­327. Online.
Norrander, Barbara. "The History of the Gender Gaps." ​Voting the Gender Gap​. Urbana: U of
Illinois, 2008. Print.
Zink, James, James Spriggs, and John Scott. "Courting the Public: The Influence of Decision
Attributes on Individuals' Views of Court Opinions." ​The Journal of Politics​ 71.3
(2009): 909­925.
17