Institutional legitimacy stands alone as the most important form of political capital in democratic systems. In the United States, the Supreme Court, whose members are unelected and serve life terms, is constitutionally ill-equipped to generate this capital via conventional means. Unlike the elected branches of government, whose offices are replete with legitimacy as a result of free and fair elections, the federal judiciary must amass and maintain public support. Without this support, termed ``diffuse support," the elected branches on whom the judiciary relies for resources, deference, and enforcement of its decisions would not be incentivized to offer those political commodities. Luckily for the Court, the American public is largely supportive of the judicial branch and tends to offer this political capital in spades. Indeed, the Court is, simply, ``different." The theory of positivity bias suggests that preexisting support for the Supreme Court influences how citizens perceive Court actions and outcomes. Anterior support begets support. Furthermore, legitimizing judicial imagery -- such as robes, gavels, and the dais on which the justices sit -- bolsters support for the institution, even when one stands to lose on policy grounds. Concisely, the average American has a deep appreciation for the federal judiciary.In this project, I offer three essays that examine various aspects of Supreme Court legitimacy, its formation, its malleability, and its influence on separation of powers interactions. I first demonstrate, using experimental data gathered via Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform, that manipulating the source of negative statements about the judiciary produces changes in one's level of support for the Supreme Court. Individuals with negative valence toward a political figure increase their level of support for the judiciary after reading negative statements that figure made about the judiciary, and vice versa. What is more, while individuals do glean some ideological information from the cue and update their position relative the Court accordingly, changes are largely affective. Next, I capitalize on panel data fortuitously collected shortly before and shortly after the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia, as well as an experimental design embedded within the second cross-section, to examine how a sudden vacancy impacts attitudes toward the Supreme Court. Exposure to information regarding the legal importance of filling the vacancy, when coupled with exposure to legitimating judicial symbols, positively influences diffuse support. Democratic respondents, who stood to gain on policy grounds, were particularly susceptible to increases in support. The power of judicial imagery is sufficient to increase positivity even in the face of intense politicization of the Court by the elected branches.Finally, I demonstrate that a particular variant of public support conditions interactions between the judiciary and Congress. First, I consider how Congress' commitment to acting on behalf of the public, as well as the difficulty of assessing diffuse support, incentivizes members of Congress to gauge short-term public support for the judiciary. Then, I detail how the imprecise measurement of key concepts has limited empirical inquiry in this line of research, offer a corrective strategy, and validate that the new measure behaves in a manner consistent with theory. Lastly, I provide evidence that congressional willingness to offer discretion and resources to the judiciary is contingent upon short-term, ephemeral support for the Court, as opposed to long-term, diffuse support.
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