Do judicial dissents affect mass politics? Many people, including judges, scholars, political commentators, and public officials claim that they do. The conventional wisdom is that unanimous rulings boost support for court decisions, while judicial division fuels popular opposition. As such, it has been suggested that courts present a united front on controversial cases as a strategy for garnering support and quelling resistance. However, empirical analysis of the public perception of judicial unanimity and dissent is sparse, incomplete, and inconsistent.

This dissertation is broadly guided by the question of whether unity/division among judges can in fact influence media coverage of and popular attitudes toward court decisions. In doing so, I consider both the role of the news media as an intermediary between the courts and the public and direct public reaction to information about court unity. Using a combination of existing and original data, I analyze newspaper coverage patterns to determine if judicial consensus has an independent effect on the visibility and favorability of Supreme Court coverage. While previous work has assumed that the correlation between coverage and division is the result of the most newsworthy cases producing the most divided outcomes, I find that dissent on the Supreme Court generates press coverage independent of other factors associated with a case's newsworthiness. Moreover, this dissertation is the first study to find that narrower Supreme Court majorities attract more critical coverage.

In addition, using a series of original survey experiments from a nationally representative sample, I expand and improve upon existing research of the direct popular reaction to judicial unanimity and dissent. Though most previous work on this subject had found no link between judicial consensus and public opinion, recently published findings have suggested that unanimity does indeed boost agreement with Supreme Court decisions across a variety of issue areas. Breaking with this, I find that popular reaction to judicial consensus is highly dependent on the ideological salience of the issue involved and that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, dissent can actually foster acceptance of rulings among the Court's opponents by suggesting evidence of procedural justice. However, this effect of majority size on public opinion appears limited to the Supreme Court: I find no evidence of a similar effect at the lower court level.

This dissertation improves upon the existing body of knowledge regarding the judiciary's role in the political world. Not only does it reveal potential evidence of a news media bias toward judicial conflict, its public opinion findings buck both the conventional wisdom and the extant literature. Rather than suggesting that unanimity generally leads to a more supportive populace, as the conventional wisdom argues, or that there is no connection at all, as much of the scholarly literature claims, my findings show that the relationship between judicial consensus is more nuanced and is frequently the opposite of what the conventional wisdom suggests.

This theory-building dissertation investigates how states' narratives about dark pasts are shaped and contested over time, employing macro-historical analysis to trace the trajectories over the past several decades of Turkey's narrative of the Armenian Genocide and Japan's narrative of the Nanjing Massacre.

In a time of unprecedented access to information and increased scrutiny of how the past is represented, how are some states able to maintain national narratives that are at odds with widely accepted versions of the underlying historical events? Why do some states attempt to come to terms with the past perpetration of genocide or mass killing, while others deny wrongdoing for decades? Despite dramatic increases in truth-telling, truth-seeking and state apologies for historic wrongs, there remains both a great deal of variation in how states deal with their own dark pasts and insufficient understanding of the sources of this variation. Given that narratives about past atrocities can increase threat perception between states, can be used by leaders to justify war to domestic audiences, and can create tensions and prejudices that contribute to future conflicts, there are compelling reasons to investigate the dynamics underlying this variation.

The core question answered in this dissertation is: What are the sources of change and continuity in states' narratives of past crimes? Existing research tells us that domestic regime change, transnational activism and shifts in international alliances can bring about changes in states' narratives of dark pasts. Offering an integrating framework that incorporates the domestic and international spheres, I argue that while international pressures can increase the likelihood of change in official narratives of dark pasts, domestic actors largely determine the content of such change. Moreover, in contrast to observers who have warned that progressive changes in states' narratives threaten a backlash from the right, I argue that actors across the political spectrum contest and shape narratives of the past. My findings are based on more than eight months of fieldwork, including archival research in Turkey, and over seventy-five elite interviews conducted in Turkey, Japan and the United States.

Building on comparative research on institutional change and feedback effects, this research contributes to literature on the impact of international norms, institutions and law on states' behavior, to scholarship on the politics of memory and transitional justice, and to work at the intersection of Turkish studies and genocide studies. My research will also help policymakers better deal with controversies over the past, by revealing the sources of change and continuity in narratives of the past and the longer-term dynamics set off by pressures on and changes in official narratives.