Public confidence in the American legal system has plunged over the past four years, a new Gallup poll found, putting it in the company of nations like Myanmar, Syria and Venezuela.
“These data on the U.S. courts are stunning,” said Tom Ginsburg, an authority on comparative and international law at the University of Chicago.
After the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade and the several prosecutions of Donald J. Trump, Professor Ginsburg said, “there is a perception that the judiciary has become inexorably politicized.”
Between 2020 and 2024, confidence in the judicial system in the United States dropped 24 percentage points, to 35 percent from 59 percent.
“This was a striking decline in the context of global attitudes,” said Lydia Saad, the director of U.S. social research at Gallup. “These drops are typically associated with pretty significant political upheavals.”
Only nine nations of the more than 160 surveyed in the past two decades have had sharper drops over any four-year period. They include a 46-point decline in Myanmar as it returned to military rule, a 35-point drop in Venezuela as it faced economic and political turmoil and a 28-point decline in Syria in the early phases of its civil war.
Public confidence in the judiciaries of other developed nations has remained stable. Among the 38 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, median confidence in national judiciaries stood at 55 percent, a number that has been essentially constant over the past decade.
The 20-point gap between the United States and its peers is the largest since Gallup started its global poll in 2006. The 35 percent confidence rate for U.S. courts is the lowest in the history of the survey.
In 2023, the last year in which reasonably comprehensive global data were available, the United States was in 92nd place in a ranking of nations by public confidence in their judiciaries, at 42 percent. Five countries had confidence levels of 85 percent or more: Kuwait, Singapore, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland.
Among other nations ranked higher than the United States last year were Russia, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Hungary.
Since then, confidence in the American judiciary has dropped another seven points. When 2024 data are available, the United States’ global ranking “will certainly be lower,” Ms. Saad said.
The Gallup poll is not focused on the Supreme Court but on the judiciary as a whole.
Many polls have found steep drops in public approval of the Supreme Court after its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. But there was a partisan split in those results, with Democrats responsible for most of the decline.
By contrast, the new poll found bipartisan dissatisfaction with the American justice system as a whole. “Both parties have lost confidence in the courts,” Ms. Saad said, “but maybe for different reasons.”
“When we ask Republicans about the Supreme Court, they’re still very positive,” Ms. Saad added. “When you don’t pin them down on the Supreme Court and talk about the courts, they’re saying the courts are misbehaving and engaging in quote-unquote lawfare.”
Professor Ginsburg said the poll showed something new. “In contrast with earlier eras,” he added, “one side’s disapproval is not offset by approval from the other side, but we seem instead to be seeing an overall erosion of institutional confidence.”
Gallup’s global poll does not track party affiliations as such, but it does ask whether respondents approve of “the leadership of this country.”
In the four years of the Biden administration, Americans who disapproved of the nation’s leadership — mostly Republicans, presumably — steadily lost faith in its judiciary, dropping to 29 percent from 46 percent. More strikingly, support for the judiciary among those who approved of the nation’s leadership — Democrats, mainly — was quite steady in the first three years of the administration, at around 62 percent. But it plunged in 2024, to 44 percent.
“This year marks the first time on record that judicial confidence among those approving of U.S. leadership has ever dipped below 60 percent,” the Gallup report said, “and the first time that confidence in the courts has been below 50 percent among both those who approve and those who disapprove of U.S. leadership, a double whammy pushing the national figure to its lowest in two decades.”
Ms. Saad said confidence levels may yet rise. “We can expect that Republicans’ attitudes are going to change markedly next year when this is measured,” she said. “So what we’re picking up is a moment in time that isn’t necessarily destiny.”
For now, though, the new poll is a warning that the nation is in a perilous spot, Professor Ginsburg said.
“This is dangerous,” he said, “because, when public confidence is low, the judiciary is subject to frontal attacks. We’ve just seen Mexico pass a sweeping judicial overhaul that most of us believe will undermine the quality of adjudication. In other countries, high courts have been restructured by leaders who want to force through their pet projects or remain in power after their terms are over.”
“The results,” he said, “are very worrying.”
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