Last week, a New York Times/CBS poll found that only 44 percent of Americans approve of the Supreme Court’s job performance and 75 percent say the justices are sometimes influenced by their political views. But although the results of the poll were striking, commentators may have been too quick to suggest a direct link between the two findings. In the Times article on the poll, for example, Adam Liptak and Allison Kopicki suggested that the drop in the Court's 66 percent approval ratings in the late 1980s “ could reflect a sense that the court is more political, after the ideologically divided 5-to-4 decisions in Bush v. Gore and Citizens United.” At the beginning of his tenure, Chief Justice John Roberts said that he subscribed to a similar theory. “I do think the rule of law is threatened by a steady term after term after term focus on 5-4 decisions,” Roberts told me.

But a new study by Nathaniel Persily of Columbia Law School and Stephen Ansolabehere of Harvard suggests that the relationship between the Court’s declining approval ratings and increased perceptions of the Court’s partisanship may be more complicated than the New York Times and the Chief Justice suggest.

According to the study, Americans already judge the Court according to political criteria: They generally support the Court when they think they would have ruled the same way as the justices in particular cases, or when they perceive the Court overall to be ruling in ways that correlate with their partisan views. If this finding is correct, the most straightforward way for the Court to maintain its high approval ratings is to hand down decisions that majorities of the public agree with. And, like its predecessors, the Roberts Court has, in fact, managed to mirror the views of national majorities more often than not. In a 2009 survey, Persily and Ansolabehere found that the public strongly supported many of the Supreme Court’s recent high-profile decisions, including conservative rulings recognizing gun rights and upholding bans on partial birth abortions, as well as liberal rulings upholding the regulation of global warming and striking down a Texas law banning sex between gay men.

But if the public agrees with most of the Court's decisions, why is it more unpopular than ever? Part of the answer has to do with the fact that there are a handful of high profile decisions on which the Court is out of step with public opinion, including the Kelo decision allowing a local government to seize a house under eminent domain and the Boumediene case extending habeas corpus to accused enemy combatants abroad, and recent First Amendment decisions protecting unpopular speakers, such as funeral protesters, manufacturers of violent video games, and corporations (in the Citizens United case.) All of these decisions were unpopular with strong majorities of the public.