This empirical study analyzes 942 intermediate appellate court (IAC) elections held from 2000–2006, finding that while IAC judges are rarely challenged, challengers often prove difficult opponents and incumbents do lose in both partisan and nonpartisan elections.
This empirical study analyzes all intermediate appellate court elections involving incumbents from 2000–2007, using data to estimate models of challenger entry and incumbent success once challenged and discussing similarities and differences between these findings and the results of studies of higher-visibility elections.
This empirical study analyzes data from a 1982 California poll survey on state supreme court confirmation elections and concludes that voters use partisan information to structure their voting decisions during nonpartisan judicial elections.
This article outlines several problems inherent in current judicial campaign financing systems and proposes ways to reform those systems.
This empirical study examines a series of post-election surveys of voters in fourteen contests for the Ohio Supreme Court over twenty years, concluding that in a state in which candidates’ party affiliations are not disclosed on the ballot, high-visibility contests for judgeships produce more partisan voting than do lower-visibility contests, suggesting that high-visibility elections result in greater voter awareness of basic candidate information and that this information informs voting decisions.
This empirical study of North Carolina district court elections from 1994 to 1998 examines the impact of a candidate’s sex upon judicial campaigns and judicial elections, concluding that female candidates were able to secure more campaign financing than were male candidates and that it is difficult to demonstrate voter discrimination against female candidates.
This article outlines the history of the movement toward merit selection, analyzes various studies comparing merit systems to elective systems, and concludes that merit-selected judges appear to be more independent from partisan influences, less likely to reflect popular sentiment in their decisions, more diverse, and more ethical than their elected counterparts.
This article argues that four out of the five canons of judicial ethics aimed at constraining campaigning make it less likely for challengers to incumbents to win contested elections.
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.