Perceptions of courts under polarization

The question

Trust in courts has split along party lines in the United States since 2022, and the Israeli split is older and wider. The project asks two things of the comparative record, and both are included.

Design sketch

The unit is a country-year. For each survey with a courts item and a political variable, the measure is the gap in court trust between the government's supporters and its opponents, or between left and right where vote is missing, computed wave by wave. The same gap is computed for parliament and for the national government in the same file, so courts are always read against a baseline from the same respondents.

V-Dem's polarization indicators and its judicial independence measure supply the country-year context. The court-curbing episodes supply the before-and-after comparisons: Hungary from 2010, Poland from 2015, Turkey from 2010, Israel in 2023, and the United States after Dobbs in 2022.

Two known problems

Question wordings differ across series, from "confidence in the courts" on four points, to "trust in the legal system" on 0 to 10, to a yes/no in Gallup. Hemrajani (2026) reports that these wordings behave similarly in a survey experiment, which supports pooling with series fixed effects, but the claim should be checked on the overlapping country-years before anything is pooled.

The political variable is the weak link. Gallup's World Poll only began collecting party identification in 2025, the Arab Barometer has thin party data, and Afrobarometer has no left-right item.

Already on disk

Three files in Dropbox carry usable court items.

• ANES 2016-2020-2024 merged panel (covid-gaza-panel/): Supreme Court job approval, trust in the court system, the Supreme Court feeling thermometer, a GSS confidence replication, and the CSES Module 6 judiciary item, with party thermometers for polarization.
• Cooperative Election Study 2020-2022-2024 recontact panel (same folder): Supreme Court approval in all three waves and ideological placement of the Court.
• FRA 2018 survey of Jews in twelve EU states (ZA7491): a 0 to 10 trust item on the national legal system alongside parliament and the European Parliament.

Nothing from WVS, EVS, ESS, Gallup, Eurobarometer, OECD, V-Dem, or the regional barometers is on disk. The Israel polls project holds seat projections and one salience item on judicial reform; it has no court-trust column.

Sources

verified read on the cited primary page or codebook. reported from a search summary or secondary page; open the primary document before relying on it. GESIS, the ESS conditions page and Data Israel refused automated fetches and need a logged-in visit.

Literature to read first

• Gibson and Caldeira on diffuse support for courts, and Gibson, Caldeira and Spence 2003 on measuring it. Everything since argues with this baseline.
• Bartels and Johnston 2013; 2020, The Curious Case of the Supreme Court, on whether legitimacy in the United States is policy-driven.
• Levendusky and colleagues, Science Advances 2024: eight panel waves and 18 cross-sections over two decades. Partisan divergence in legitimacy was weak until 2022 and then persisted through 2023.
• Davis and colleagues, American Journal of Political Science 2026, "Partisan sorting, fatalism, and Supreme Court legitimacy": surveys 2012 to 2024; diffuse support now diverges among partisans.
• Magalhães and Garoupa, Journal of European Public Policy 31(9) 2024: difference-in-differences on Eurobarometer for Turkey, Hungary and Poland. Court curbing is associated with lower trust, and the association is much clearer among respondents ideologically distant from the government. This is the closest existing design to reading two.
• The 2023 JEPP paper on court-curbing in Hungary and Poland, synthetic control on Eurobarometer 2000-2019, which suggests verbal attacks rather than the curbing itself may drive the decline.
• "Polarized trust and democratic decline" on the V4 countries accepted 2025: ESS and V-Dem; polarization of trust is associated with lower democratic quality and appears to precede decline.
• The 2024 Israel judicial reform study (PMC 11332199) and the 2025 chapter "Fragile Trust", which pools 29 Israeli surveys carrying a Supreme Court trust item.
• Hemrajani, Political Research Quarterly 2026, on whether court-trust wordings can be pooled across surveys.
• Bauer and Morisi, Socius 2023, on polarization of trust in the European Parliament in pooled ESS 2002-2020: the template for the gap-over-time measure.
• Driscoll and Nelson's survey experiments on whether publics punish attacks on courts, and Tyler on procedural justice as the competing, contact-based explanation.

Open decisions

• Which lab carries the byline. Not set.
• Whether the first cut is the joint EVS/WVS file plus ESS (reading one, fast) or the barometers plus contact items (reading two, slower).
• Whether to request the OECD, Asian Barometer and Annenberg files now or after the free series have been read.
• Whether the Gallup 2025 party identification data are in the U of T holding.

Next steps

1. Open the GESIS, ESS and Data Israel pages with a login to confirm the reported variable names and whether the 2025 Israeli file is posted.
2. Download the WVS trend file, ESS rounds 1 to 11, Afrobarometer Round 9, CES 2025 and V-Dem v16, and build one country-year table of court, parliament and government trust gaps.
3. Request the Gallup World Poll microdata from the Map and Data Library.