The purpose of this research is to examine theories of diffuse support and institutional legitimacy by testing hypotheses about the interrelationships among the salience of courts, satisfaction with court outputs, and diffuse support for national high courts. Like our predecessors, we are constrained by essentially cross-sectional data; unlike them, we analyze mass attitudes toward high courts in eighteen countries. Because our sample includes many countries with newly formed high courts, our cross-sectional data support several longitudinal inferences, using the age of the judicial institution as an independent variable. We discover that the U.S. Supreme Court is not unique in the esteem in which it is held and, like other courts, it profits from a tendency of people to credit it for pleasing decisions but not to penalize it for displeasing ones. Generally, older courts more successfully link specific and diffuse support, most likely due to satisfying successive, nonoverlapping constituencies.

The tendency of the media to depict the Supreme Court as inherently apolitical, some scholars argue, is part of the reason that many believe in the "myth of legality" in which the Court is perceived to operate above the ideological skirmishes of everyday politics. Our experimental analyses show that citizens react more negatively to press reports of a politically motivated Court than they do to coverage portraying a Court that strictly follows legal guidelines. Interestingly, our results also suggest that it is not so much the perceived absence of political wrangling among justices but rather it is the presence of legal guidelines driving the outcome that is the source of the perception of fairness.

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The U.S. Supreme Court is widely recognized as setting its agenda by choosing to hear certain cases and refusing to hear others. But what influence, if any, does the Court have on the types of cases that are appealed to it? The Court has no formal power to solicit cases, but I contend that potential litigants interpret politically salient Court decisions as signals of its willingness to hear additional cases in certain policy areas. When this happens, the Court receives additional well‐framed cases that allow it to make policy in those areas. The theoretical implications are twofold: (1) by signaling the litigant community to support litigation in certain policy areas, the Supreme Court can bring cases onto its agenda well before the certiorari process begins, and (2) the Supreme Court is dependent on extrajudicial actors and their resources to make comprehensive policy.

Courts can better protect rights when citizens are willing and able to litigate in response to government abuses of power. However, if people are not socialized to the possibility of litigating against governments, why do some individuals decide to litigate? Using an original survey of victims in the Moscow theater hostage incident, we find that litigants in a postcommunist context are motivated by political disadvantage, defined as their perception that they are not well represented by political institutions. The effect of political disadvantage on litigation is intensified by the perception that courts, too, are not fair, suggesting that general alienation from the political system may play an important role in the decision to initiate antigovernment litigation in new states.