A recent study published in Political Research Quarterly suggests that although many Americans express preferences for specific judicial philosophies, most struggle to apply these principles consistently to legal issues. The research indicates that for the general public, judicial philosophy acts more as a symbolic label than a structured framework for evaluating the law. This disconnect provides evidence that the complex legal standards often debated during Supreme Court nominations may hold little practical meaning for the average voter.

During televised Supreme Court confirmation hearings, politicians frequently debate how nominees will interpret the United States Constitution. Two highly discussed approaches are originalism and living constitutionalism. Originalism suggests that judges should interpret the Constitution based on its meaning at the time it was written. Living constitutionalism indicates that constitutional interpretation should adapt to reflect modern views and societal sensibilities.

Judges and legal scholars frequently use these specific concepts to justify their rulings. “Judicial philosophy is one of the most prominent ways that judges, politicians, and the media talk about courts,” said Miles T. Armaly, an associate professor of political science at the University of Mississippi and co-author of the study. “A growing body of research shows that ordinary Americans express preferences for philosophies like originalism and living constitutionalism, and they even evaluate judges and case outcomes through that lens.”

“Because these philosophies tend to align with ideological predispositions at the elite level (i.e., originalism is typical of conservative judges, living constitutionalism of liberal ones), individuals may be able to nominally link a philosophy to their political preferences, but it remains unclear whether they understand what those philosophies actually entail or can apply them consistently across legal questions.”

Recognizing a legal phrase is different from putting those theories into practice. “Recognizing a label is very different from consistently applying the principles that label represents,” Armaly added. “Thus, our motivation was to distinguish between recognizing a judicial philosophy and consistently applying it across different legal questions.”

The authors designed this research to test if the public possesses philosophical constraint. This term describes a cohesive belief system where specific attitudes about legal issues naturally flow from a broader understanding of judicial philosophy. A highly constrained individual would consistently support legal outcomes that match their chosen philosophy.

The authors wanted to see if everyday citizens apply these legal principles as consistently as trained legal professionals do. “Part of our contribution is methodological,” Armaly said. “Rather than assuming legal professionals possess coherent judicial philosophies, we measure them directly and compared them to the mass public. That comparison gives us a much more meaningful benchmark than comparing the public to an abstract ideal of what citizens ‘should’ know.”

To explore this question, the researchers collected data from two separate surveys. First, they gathered responses from a nationally representative sample of 1,000 United States adults using the 2022 Cooperative Election Study. Second, they recruited an online sample of 483 legal professionals in early 2025. This specialized group consisted largely of practicing attorneys, paralegals, and legal assistants.

Participants in both groups answered questions designed to test their understanding and application of judicial philosophy. The scientists first measured basic preference consistency by asking participants to identify their preferred philosophy. The survey asked if respondents believed the Constitution’s meaning is fixed or can change. It also asked if judges should interpret the text as originally understood or according to current modern views.

The authors then measured horizontal constraint, which looks at how consistently individuals apply a philosophy across different scenarios. Participants read five hypothetical cases dealing with constitutional issues like Miranda rights, gun ownership, and political speech. For each case, they chose an outcome that aligned with either an originalist or a living constitutionalist perspective. The survey offered explicit hints in the case descriptions to help respondents match outcomes to specific legal philosophies.

Next, the scientists evaluated vertical constraint to see if participants’ specific case choices matched their originally stated judicial philosophy. For example, if a person claimed to be an originalist, the researchers checked whether that person selected originalist outcomes in the hypothetical cases. The researchers measured this by calculating the proportion of matching responses across fifteen possible combinations.

The results suggest a broad disconnect among the general public regarding judicial philosophy. When asked to pick a preferred legal philosophy, 44.5 percent of the mass public chose “not sure,” while only 23.7 percent of legal professionals selected the unsure option. Only about 30 percent of the general public provided consistent answers across the three basic philosophy questions.

The authors did not anticipate such a high level of uncertainty. “We were a bit surprised by the number of respondents who simply declined to express a preference when given a ‘not sure’ option,” Armaly told PsyPost. “Nearly half of the mass public did not identify with either originalism or living constitutionalism when that option was available. This suggests that earlier research, which didn’t always offer a ‘not sure’ response, may have overstated how many Americans truly have meaningful preferences over judicial philosophy.”

When looking at horizontal constraint, the mass public showed very little consistency in their responses to the specific legal cases. Legal professionals exhibited about 32 percent more consistency across the varying scenarios than the general public. Even with helpful hints provided in the question text, average citizens struggled to pick outcomes that followed a single, cohesive legal framework.

The findings for vertical constraint were similar. Legal professionals achieved a consistency score of about 0.54, meaning they matched their case outcomes to their stated philosophy 54 percent of the time. The mass public scored approximately 0.38, meaning their case outcomes matched their stated philosophy only 38 percent of the time.

According to Armaly, these numerical gaps between experts and the general public reveal a lot about how people process legal information. “The difference we found were not only statistically significant, but also substantively meaningful,” Armaly said. “Legal professionals exhibited roughly one-third more ‘horizontal’ philosophical constraint (i.e., consistency across legal attitudes) and about 45% more ‘vertical’ philosophy constraint (i.e., consistency between stated philosophy and legal positions) relative to the mass public.”

This gap suggests that extensive legal training provides a structure that everyday voters lack. “Those are sizeable differences, suggesting that judicial philosophy functions as an organizing framework for legal professionals, but only weakly for members of the public,” Armaly added.

Despite these low scores among the public, the researchers caution against making broad judgments about voters’ civic abilities. “The main takeaway is not that Americans are uninformed or incapable of thinking about constitutional issues,” Armaly said. “Instead, we find that most people do not appear to organize their views around abstract judicial philosophies in the same way that legal professionals do. Many people can express a preference for, say, originalism, but the label often does not translate into consistent judgments across different legal questions.”

“This is important because individuals offer more institutional support and are more likely to accept outcomes when they perceive courts to employ their preferred policy,” Armaly explained. “However, in the absence of a label describing the decision as ‘originalist’ or ‘living constitutionalist,’ many are infrequently able to spot judicial decisions that employed their preferred philosophy.”

A lack of philosophical constraint does not mean that the public ignores legal interpretation entirely. “One important caveat is that our findings should not be interpreted as saying that judicial philosophy is unimportant, that the public ignores it, or that the public lacks the capacity to use judicial philosophy in a coherent, structured way,” Armaly said. “Previous research shows that people do respond to judges’ stated philosophies when evaluating nominees and court decisions. We do not doubt that these are important factors for individuals assessing institutions.”

Instead, the results provide evidence that the depth of public understanding is often shallow. “Our point is narrower,” Armaly explained. “Many people seem to recognize and use the labels without possessing a deeply structured understanding of what those philosophies consistently imply across cases. Our findings suggest that, for many, judicial philosophy is more of a label than a lens, more akin to a bumper sticker than a belief system.”

One potential limitation is that the online sample of legal professionals might not perfectly represent the entire population of working attorneys and judges in the United States. The data also indicates that even basic ideological consistency does not fully explain the public’s varied responses to specific constitutional cases. Future studies could explore how these patterns translate to other countries with different constitutional frameworks.

The researchers also plan to investigate the origins of the public’s legal opinions. “One natural next step is to better understand how people learn these philosophical labels,” Armaly said. “We know that politicians, confirmation hearings, and the media regularly invoke terms like ‘originalism,’ but it remains an open question whether those discussions increase genuine understanding or simply increase familiarity with the labels.”

“More broadly, we’re interested in how people form attitudes about courts and whether those attitudes are grounded in legal principles, political identities, or something else.”

The study, “Do Americans Understand the Judicial Philosophies They Endorse? Evidence From Mass and Elite Surveys,” was authored by Miles T. Armaly, Christopher N. Krewson, and Elizabeth A. Lane.

People actively alter how much and what kind of news they read depending on whether the day’s headlines are favorable or unfavorable to their preferred political party. New research published in the American Journal of Political Science demonstrates that news consumption is highly dynamic, with both Democrats and Republicans shifting their browsing habits in response to negative coverage. These shifts can include avoiding hard news, ending a reading session early, or retreating to ideologically aligned outlets.

In the modern media environment, people face an overwhelming amount of information and almost limitless choices about what to read. Researchers have studied how this abundance affects political knowledge, often focusing on two broad behaviors. The first is selective exposure, where individuals seek out news outlets that confirm their existing political beliefs. The second is news avoidance, a behavior where people disengage from current events entirely, often due to feelings of anxiety or information overload. Both behaviors carry implications for a functioning society, as avoiding the news entirely can lead to lower levels of civic engagement and public knowledge.

These behaviors are frequently treated as stable traits, categorizing people as either constant news avoiders or loyal consumers of partisan media. But human behavior is rarely so static. People might feel motivated to read the news during major political events but choose to tune out when the headlines become upsetting or challenge their worldview. When people encounter information that contradicts their core values, they experience a form of psychological discomfort known as cognitive dissonance. To restore mental balance, an individual might actively avoid the source of that discomfort or seek out information that reassures them.

A team of researchers led by Michael Heseltine, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam, investigated whether news consumption fluctuates based on immediate political developments. Heseltine, along with political scientists Hennes Barnehl at the University of California San Diego and Magdalena Wojcieszak at the University of California Davis, proposed a concept they call partisan temporal selective avoidance.

They hypothesized that people dynamically adjust their news habits to avoid cognitive dissonance based on whether the current news cycle reflects poorly on their own political party or their opponents. The researchers wanted to know if partisans completely stop reading the news, switch to entertainment stories, or retreat to friendly news outlets when their party faces a scandal.

To test this idea, the researchers analyzed the online browsing histories in a large study of 2,462 adult internet users in the United States over a nine-month period in 2019. The dataset included more than 27 million individual web visits, which the researchers filtered using a comprehensive list of over 5,000 national and local news domains. The researchers used machine learning tools to categorize the visited news articles. They distinguished between hard news, which covers politics and economics, and soft news, which covers topics like local crime, sports, and entertainment.

To accurately assess the political tone of millions of articles, the researchers built two automated text classifiers. They trained these machine learning models using thousands of social media posts from mainstream news organizations like The Associated Press and Reuters. Human coders manually labeled a subset of these posts to teach the software how to identify negative sentiment toward Republican or Democratic politicians. Once trained, the software scanned the titles of the articles in the participants’ browsing histories to determine the political tone of each visit.

The research team evaluated the data on two levels. First, they conducted a macro-level analysis to see how the overall daily news environment affected reading habits. They assigned a daily sentiment score based on whether the dominant news stories of the day were negative toward Democrats or Republicans. By averaging the sentiment of major news coverage over a rolling three-day period, the researchers created a snapshot of the general political climate. Then, they compared these daily scores to the actual browsing behaviors of the study participants.

On this daily level, the researchers found that partisans reacted to unfavorable news cycles in different ways. When the daily news environment was negative toward their own party, Democrats did not decrease their overall news consumption. Instead, they reduced their consumption of hard news, pivoting toward soft news topics. When the news was negative toward Republicans, Democrats consumed more news articles overall.

Republicans exhibited a different pattern in response to the daily news cycle. When the news was negative toward their own party, Republicans slightly increased their overall news consumption. However, this increase was primarily driven by a shift toward ideologically aligned, conservative news outlets. When the daily news cycle was negative toward Democrats, Republicans did not make statistically significant changes to their news consumption.

The researchers also conducted a micro-level analysis to see what happens within an individual browsing session after a person reads a specific article. They tracked users sequentially to measure the immediate effect of reading a negative political story. This allowed the team to see if encountering an unfavorable headline prompted users to abandon the news entirely or seek out different types of content in real time.

At this granular level, reading a negative article about one’s own party reduced the length of the remaining news browsing session. For both Democrats and Republicans, encountering a story that cast their preferred party in a negative light made them more likely to stop reading the news shortly afterward. If Democrats were browsing a mainstream or non-aligned outlet and encountered an unfavorable article, they were slightly more likely to switch to a left-leaning outlet for the remainder of their session. Republicans also exhibited an increase in reading negative news about their own party after an initial exposure, though this often occurred on ideologically aligned platforms.

Encountering negative news about the opposing party also shaped subsequent behavior. For Democrats, reading an article negative toward Republicans slightly decreased the length of their overall reading session. Yet for both groups, exposure to a negative story about the opposition prompted them to seek out a higher proportion of hard news and additional negative news stories before they closed their browsers. This suggests that reading bad news about a political rival can be highly engaging, motivating partisans to dive deeper into political coverage.

The study relies on browsing data from 2019, a period dominated by the first impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. During this time, the overall news environment was consistently more negative toward Republicans than Democrats. The differences in how Democrats and Republicans adjusted their reading habits might reflect the specific political dynamics of that year rather than permanent psychological differences between the two groups. Future research will need to examine whether these specific partisan differences persist under different political administrations.

The findings are based solely on desktop and laptop web browsing. This data collection method misses news consumed via smartphones, television broadcasts, print media, and radio. As a result, the study captures only a portion of the participants’ total media diets. The research also focuses entirely on the two-party political system of the United States. It remains unknown how people in countries with multiparty systems adjust their news consumption when faced with unfavorable coverage of their preferred political groups.

The study, “Partisan temporal selective news avoidance: Evidence from online trace data,” was authored by Michael Heseltine, Hennes Barnehl, and Magdalena Wojcieszak.