The changing nature of public support for the Supreme Court of Canada

This article investigates the relationship between diffuse support for the Supreme Court of Canada (general, lasting attachments to the institution) and specific support (attitudes toward its policy outputs). The authors hypothesize that diffuse support for the Court will not be closely related to specific support until after 1988, when the Court began making a number of controversial decisions. Using data from 1987 and 1997, the authors test multivariate models of the determinants of diffuse support and discover that it is indeed corr-elated more with democratic norms than with attitudes toward specific policies in 1987, while the reverse is true in 1997. The fact that support for the Court now appears to be more closely tied to its decisions could have important political implications for the Court.