Under what circumstances can courts influence the public? This question is of much greater importance for courts than for other political institutions because they have no formal mechanisms to enforce their decisions and instead depend on their ability to convince the other branches and the public of the wisdom of those judgments. Empirical studies of the influence of court decisions on public opinion have been developed in, but limited to the United States when, in fact, this relationship should be observed in courts around the world. To investigate whether this is the case, this dissertation is the first to provide a systematic, theory driven, empirical evaluation of judicial decisions on public opinion outside of the United States and the first to do so in Australia. Furthermore, the psychological foundations of influence, which suggests persuasion may depend on individual levels of sophistication, has not been assessed in previous studies because of survey artifacts, but is overcome and investigated here. Lastly, the extent to which contextual effects, related to individual surroundings, act as an alternative or rival influence to court decisions on public opinion is assessed.
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