ON THE LEGITIMACY OF NATIONAL HIGH COURTS

The purpose of this research is to examine theories of diffuse support and institutional legitimacy by testing hypotheses about the interrel ationships among the salience of courts, satisfaction with court outpu ts, and diffuse support for national high courts. Like our predecessor s, 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 cour ts, 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 if 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 spec ific and diffuse support most likely doe to satisfying successive, non overlapping constituencies.