This article argues that Key’s concept of “friends and neighbors” politics, which uses the phenomenon of localism to explain voting behaviors, should be extended into the realm of campaign finance.
This article outlines several problems inherent in current judicial campaign financing systems and proposes ways to reform those systems.
This article reports the results of a survey of candidates who ran in state supreme court elections in 2006 and suggests that candidates’ campaign organizations rely largely on volunteer labor rather than paid staff or consultants, and that parties and interest groups play a limited role in campaign organization.
This article analyzes the effects of different rules that restrict spending for judicial candidates in terms of their impact on both the cost of elections and their level of competition.
This empirical study gathers data from 260 supreme court elections held from 1990–2004 to show that greater campaign spending increases voter participation.
This article relies upon an experiment embedded within a representative national survey to conclude that the legitimacy of elected state courts is threatened not by the exercise of the free speech rights extended to candidates for judicial office in Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, but by campaign contributions.
This article presents survey data indicating that while campaign contributions and attack ads in judicial elections threaten the legitimacy of courts, policy pronouncements do not.
This article uses post hoc and experimental methods to assess whether public perceptions of courts are influenced by various sorts of campaign activity and concludes that different types of campaign activity (e.g. policy pronouncements and policy promises) have very different consequences.
This empirical study examines the factors that predicted campaign spending in 172 contested state intermediate appellate court races from 2000–2006 and finds that the characteristics of the race, institutional factors, and the context of the campaign are all relevant.