'Court curbing in federal judiciary' (AsPredicted #12830)
Author(s) This pre-registration is currently anonymous to enable blind peer-review. It has 2 authors.
Pre-registered on 2018/07/22 - 05:26 AM (PT)
1) Have any data been collected for this study already? No, no data have been collected for this study yet.
2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study? Political scientists have long theorized that it is the public diffuse support for the court serves as a defense system for incumbents’ attacks, deterring threats to strip the court of a particular jurisdiction, eliminate tenure or impeach individual justices, or to eliminate the court altogether. We have little evidence, observational or otherwise, that said mechanism actually works as theory would lead us to believe.
We intend to test this conjecture experimentally, randomly exposing respondents' not only to information about an incumbent's intention on packing the federal courts, but also to the partisanship of the sponsor, and the motivation (either efficiency or politicization) for said reform. We can then evaluate the extent to which it is true that the public objects to incumbents' meddling with the federal judiciary, the extent to which said objections are mitigated or exacerbated when exposed to different kinds of instrumental justifications, and the extent to which these attitudes are conditional on the ideological leaning and partisanship of the respondents.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. We have several outcome variables: (a) willingness to vote for incumbent in a proximate (hypothetical) election, (b) approval of the proposal, (c) incumbent job performance, and (d) willingness to ascribe institutional legitimacy. We will measure `legitimacy' with a battery of questions that has been extensively pre-vetted and validated in the context of public support for judiciaries. However, we extend those questions to the U.S. Congress and the U.S. federal judiciary.
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? Treatment 1:No partisanship, Democrat, Republican
Treatment 2: No rationale given, Ideological effort to stack courts, neutral effort to make courts more efficient and responsive.
Respondents will be assigned equally to each of the 9 conditions.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. We will begin by analyzing the experimental results via difference-of-means tests to explore the effects of the treatments on each dependent variable. Second, we will explore heterogeneous treatment effects by partisanship/ideological congruence, knowledge, democratic values, diffuse support, and incumbent support. We will test for these effects using regression models in order to control for possible confounders.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. NA
7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size? No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined. 2500 subjects on Amazon MTurk
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) We will include batteries on democratic values and preferences regarding independence of the national judiciary (SCOTUS). We further examine diffuse support for the national judiciary, SCOTUS< and Congress and pre- and post-treatment.
