Which Elites Move Trust in Courts? Impact of Expert vs. Partisan Cues on Judicial Legitimacy

Elite cues shape citizen beliefs, and public appraisals of courts often track partisanship. But which elites matter more —experts or politicians? Using a media corpus of roughly 700,000 articles from leading Hungarian outlets (2010–2023), I combine “unexpected event” designs around salient court decisions with Eurobarometer/European Social Survey measures of trust in the justice system. I test two mechanisms: (a) within-case moderation, where expert commentary tempers partisan reactions to specific rulings; and (b) cumulative updating, where repeated expert signals shift citizen's priors over time. The results will speak to democratic resilience: can expert commentary buffer partisan polarization over courts during episodes of democratic backsliding?