Supreme Court Justice "Net Popularity Scores"
You may recall our recent Above the Law reader polls for Most Favorite Supreme Court Justice and Least Favorite Supreme Court Justice. The results of those polls are available here and here, respectively.
One of you had an interesting suggestion: Combine the results of the two polls to generate "net popularity scores" for the justices. These scores, combining measures of how much each justice is liked and disliked, could be viewed as measuring "overall" popularity.
We thought it would be interesting to see the results, so we went ahead and did this. We took the percentage of the vote each justice received in the "Most Favorite" poll, then subtracted from it the percentage of the vote received in the "Least Favorite" poll. We labeled the result the justice's "Net Popularity Score" (NPS).
Here are the results of this number-crunching, with the justices ranked by NPS, from highest to lowest:
A few quick thoughts:
1. The rankings strike us as decent measures of overall popularity. Two of the top three finishers are favorites of their respective ideological wings. Justice Scalia, a cult figure among conservatives, comes in first; Justice Stevens, a hero of the liberals, places third.
2. The Chief is like Sara Lee: Nobody doesn't like him. He got zero percent of the votes in the "Least Favorite" poll (just 24 votes out of 6,290). And, presumably due to his good looks and great resume -- since he doesn't have many opinions to be judged by yet -- he won 16 percent of the "Most Favorite" vote. This gave him an NPS of 16, almost enough to beat Nino.
3. The next three justices -- Justices Breyer, Thomas, and Alito -- have net popularity scores close to zero. This makes sense too: as jurists, they don't excite grand passion (even if Justice Thomas, prior to his confirmation, was a controversial figure).
4. Justice Alito, a fairly low-key personality, earns a "perfect" score of zero. Two percent of voters picked him as their favorite; two percent picked him as their least favorite. He's like The Justice Who Wasn't There (although, in fairness to Justice Alito, he's too new to the bench to have made many enemies or fans).
5. Three justices have negative net popularity scores: Justices Kennedy, Souter, and Ginsburg. Their negative scores may have been affected by the fact that the voter pool in the "Least Favorite Justice" pool skewed to the right (thanks in large part to an Instapundit link).
6. As for why Justice Ginsburg attracted such a high percentage of the "least favorite" votes, Ann Althouse -- and her commenters -- have some interesting thoughts on the matter.
Earlier: ATL Poll Results: Your LEAST Favorite Supreme Court Justice
ATL Poll Results: Your Favorite Supreme Court Justice
(5) 
Do opposites attract? I have sometimes wondered about the relationship between the NPS winner and loser. It's amazing that two justices as jurisprudentially and temperamentally different as AS and RBG can stand to sit at the same bench, let alone share the back of an elephant. (RBG recently commented on their friendship -- and the elephant incident -- here.) Anybody have insight/stories?
Surprisingly, after Justice Alito, Justice Kennedy inspires the least reaction. Are people really indifferent, because he was definitely my least favorite.
If we list the total reaction, positive or negative, we get this list:
Ginsburg 48
Scalia 33
Souter 30
Stevens 23
Thomas 21
Roberts 16
Kennedy 11
Breyer 14
Alito 4
I think we should throw out the Ginsburg negative votes--they seem suspiciously high. If we reallocate those votes to the others, we get these total-reaction numbers:
Souter 11 + 32 = 43
Scalia 25 + 13 = 38
Stevens 15 + 13 = 28
Thomas 11 + 17 = 28
Breyer 9 + 8 = 17
Kennedy 3 + 13 = 16
Roberts 16 + 0 = 16
Alito 2 + 3 = 5
And we get these Ginsburg-less differences:
Roberts 16 – 0 = 16
Scalia 25 – 13 = 12
Stevens 15 – 13 = 2
Breyer 9 – 8 = 1
Alito 2 – 3 = –1
Thomas 11 – 17 = –6
Kennedy 3 – 13 = –10
Souter 11 – 32 = –21
Anon 8:45: The more sensitive and intelligent you are, the easier it is to appreciate someone for qualities the average person might not find readily apparent. Two articulate, brilliant people who care very deeply about what they do don't need to agree about everything to see the good in each other and get along. Besides, they both love opera, so I imagine they'd never run out of things to talk about!
8:52: "Are people really indifferent"? Yes, they most certainly are. I'd guess 65 percent of people around here are voting on politics, and another 30 percent strictly on ideology. Given the above, I wouldn't expect more than five percent to "get it", in any case.
He's definitely my favorite, for a whole host of reasons.
Thomas -- no passion? I would think his brand of originalism inspires many people, particularly his Lopez concurrence, his dissents in Kelo and Harris, and his opinion in Bajakajian, enforcing the excessive fines clause and preventing it form becoming a dead letter.