The Placement of Conflict: The Supreme Court and Issue Attention in the National Media Chapter uri icon

abstract

  • Richard Davis 2014. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously writes that, Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question. Indeed, the observation is famous, in part, because scholars of law and judicial politics so often invoke it to highlight the important role that courts, especially the Supreme Court, play in American national politics. Yet, in the past two decades, a small but important body of research in political science has shown that de Tocquevilles observation about the judicialization of political questions is, at best, incomplete. Though issues on the national political agenda often involve legal or constitutional questions that are resolved by the Supreme Court, political scientists have found convincing evidence that Supreme Court decisions can create questions of national political importance. In other words, legal and constitutional questions decided by the United States Supreme Court may resolve into national political issues. In particular, political scientists have found that Supreme Court decisions which have the effect of disrupting established policy regimes may draw the national medias attention to the issues involved in those cases (Flemming, Bohte, and Wood 1997; Flemming, Wood, and Bohte 1999; Ura 2009). In particular, these studies have found that the Supreme Court has played a significant role in raising the prominence of civil rights, civil liberties, free speech, religious liberty, and gay rights in the national media in recent decades. In turn, the prominence of these issues in the media has often been reflected in the policy agendas of Congress, the president, and the states, with significant consequences for the development of partisan and electoral politics. Most critically perhaps, the Supreme Courts decision to invalidate state- mandated segregation in public education in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) pushed civil rights onto the national agenda (e.g., Flemming, Bohte, and Wood 1997; Klarman 2004), which resulted in the enactment of both the most important civil rights legislation since Reconstruction and the gradual exodus of Southern whites from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party (e.g., Carmines and Stimson 1989; Hetherington 2009; Poole and Rosenthal 1997; Perlstein 2001; McMahon 2011).

author list (cited authors)

  • Ura, J. D.

citation count

  • 2

complete list of authors

  • Ura, Joseph Daniel

Book Title

  • COVERING THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT IN THE DIGITAL AGE

publication date

  • January 2014