An Activist Court? Reassessing the Decline In Trust In the Israeli Supreme Court

Public trust in the Israeli Supreme Court has been declining in recent decades. The most common explanation for this is that the court became more involved in political affairs, thus destroying its public image as an objective and apolitical institution. I posit that this reason alone cannot explain the decline in public support for the court. I explain this first by demonstrating how the “political involvement” theory does not account for the timing in which public trust in the court dropped considerably, and how public trust has not increased in response to the Supreme Court’s recent hesitancy to contest the decisions of Israel’s other branches of government. Second, I argue that other social actors—such as commercial television channels and ultra-orthodox leaders—have been involved in the process of actively changing the way that the Israeli public perceives the Supreme Court. I claim that the impact of these social actors must be examined to truly understand the reasons for the declining trust in the Supreme Court.