Perceptions of a Polarized Court: How Division among Justices Shapes the Supreme Court’s Public Image. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2018. 198 pp. $94.50 (cloth). $32.95 (paper)

Conventional wisdom holds that unanimously decided U.S. Supreme Court cases will garner greater public acceptance. Alternatively, a slightly different version of this wisdom is that larger majorities are better than smaller majorities when it comes to public acceptance of Court decisions. This wisdom pervades scholarship on public opinion of the Court, models of Court decision-making, and, at least anecdotally, the justices themselves. In Perceptions of a Polarized Court, Michael Salamone examines whether newspapers cover Supreme Court decisions in a manner that is necessary for the conventional wisdom to hold and then uses a survey experiment to test whether majority coalition size actually affects how people respond to Court decisions. The results—that the media behave as expected but the public do not—are intriguing and make a substantial contribution to the literature on public opinion regarding the Supreme Court as well as the literature on judicial decision-making. As Salamone points out, for the public to respond to levels of dissensus on the Court, it is necessary for them to be aware of these divisions, and the most likely source of information is the news media. Two-thirds of the empirical chapters of Perceptions of a Polarized Court thus examine newspaper coverage of Supreme Court decisions. Salamone shows that the number of dissenting justices in a case (the “level of division,” in Salamone’s terminology) is positively associated with newspaper coverage of the decision. The analysis here is careful and convincing, as Salamone rules out the possibility of inherently divisive cases causing both judicial dissensus and media coverage by examining the level of newspaper coverage both before and after the Court’s decision. Perhaps more importantly, Salamone goes on to show that the level of division increases the likelihood of newspapers framing the decision in ideological terms. Thus, there is evidence for one of the key building blocks of the division-leads-to-less-acceptance story. Not only is division on the Court conveyed to the public, but it increases the chances of the decision being framed in political or ideological terms.