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Abstract

Personal experiences with public officials influence how those officials are perceived. We question whether these experiential effects extend to other officials. If people draw on what they know to make inferences about unfamiliar evaluative targets, then interactions with one actor may shape evaluations of other independent actors. Focusing on police and courts, analyses of data from two surveys reveal that personal interactions with public officials produce spillover effects on appraisals of officials in different sectors. The findings indicate that experiential spillover constitutes an underappreciated force in public opinion, one that operates outside the control of the actors being evaluated.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

Notes/Citation Information

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1017/jlc.2026.10013

Funding Information

Data for Study One were gathered under our supervision with the support of the Washington State Supreme Court Minority and Justice Commission, and the State of Washington Administrative Office of the Courts–Washington State Center for Court Research. We thank all involved in this project, and especially Carl McCurley, for their contributions. Data for Study Two were gathered with financial support from the James M. Benson Fund at the University of Illinois. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive suggestions.

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