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In recent years scholars have extensively explored the degree to which political attitudes in the American electorate have become polarized along partisan lines. Our focus in this paper is to examine whether this polarization exists in public attitudes about the U.S. Supreme Court. While many scholars have proposed event-based explanations for public attitudes about the Court by highlighting the influence of judicial decisions on opinion formation, we propose an alternative explanation based on elite cue theory. In this paper we argue that public attitudes about the Supreme Court are driven by patterns of discourse among partisan elites. Utilizing approximately 40 years of cross- sectional time series data from different public opinion surveys, as well as text-as-data from the Congressional Record of speeches during the 104th to 109th Congress, we find support for an elite cue explanation of public attitudes about the Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epp's 'Rights Revolution' theory provides a compelling appraisal of the rise of rights protection in national policy making. He argues that the expansion of rights litigation in the agendas of high courts in four countries -the U.S., England, Canada and India-, results chiefly from the existence of a support structure in society to bring the cases to court, to finance the costs of litigation, and to encourage popular support for an expansion of rights. In this paper we seek to expand Epp's analysis by filling the gap produced by his methodological shortcomings and introducing Australia, Philippines and Mexico into the analysis. The preliminary results discussed in this paper show that one's conclusions about the existence and extent of a rights revolution in these countries can be sensitive to slight data and methodological issues. Further consideration of England and India reflects a picture of rights protection that differs from Epp's in significant respects. Moreover, a look at Australia, The Philippines and Mexico cast doubt on the leverage provided by the rights-support structure hypothesis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]