On motives and means: how approach and justification for court-curbing impact public trust

High profile court-curbing episodes from around the world are usually justified by populists who seek to minimize public backlash and legitimize their attacks on courts. Yet we do not know their effect on public trust in the target of reform. In this study we evaluate (1) whether different forms of court-curbing policies affect public confidence in their pinnacle court; (2) how populists’ justifications for these institutional attacks impact citizens’ trust; and (3) how support for the incumbent government condition public responses to (1) and (2). We fielded a face-to-face, nationally representative survey experiment with 1014 respondents in Turkey, where court-curbing is common, and the public support of the populist incumbent varies. We find that irrespective of its form, court-curbing of any kind undermines the public’s confidence in the constitutional court, although presenting the citizens with justifications does not affect their trust. Nevertheless, we observe that these effects are highly dependent on pre-existing government support or opposition, a fact that aligns with extant research on the instrumental foundations of public support for courts.