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Is support for the US Supreme Court stable over time? Recent studies present conflicting evidence about the extent to which dissatisfaction with the Court's performance affects its public support. Drawing on a four-year panel study of Americans' support for the Supreme Court, we demonstrate that the Court's support has been remarkably stable in the aggregate, although there has been systematic change at the individual level. These individual-level changes are related to respondents' satisfaction with the Court's performance and their political orientations. The results both confirm and challenge conventional wisdom, emphasizing the importance of studying individual-level change in attitudes even in the face of aggregate stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2016 presidential election provided a unique opportunity to revisit two competing hypotheses for how voters establish their perceptions of electoral integrity. First, mass public opinion is believed to derive from elite messages. In the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump maintained that the election system was “rigged,” while election administration experts and officials received considerable media coverage in their efforts to counter Trump’s claims. Second, literature on voter confidence has established a “winner effect”—voters who cast ballots for winners are more likely than voters on the losing side to believe their vote was counted correctly. Thus, voters were exposed to two theoretically opposite effects. In this paper, we find that the “winner” effect mitigates the effects from strong pre-election cues from elites. We also show the effect of pre-election attention to the rigging issue, find a symmetry of the election outcome effect for winners and losers, and reconsider our explanations of the winner effect. Finally, we go beyond the existing studies of the winner effect to consider the kind of citizens who are most susceptible to that effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]