This empirical study uses death penalty votes in state supreme courts to show that personal as well as policy considerations affect the goals of judicial actors and that the pursuit of these goals is furthered or hindered by different types of institutional arrangements.
This empirical study suggests that state supreme court justices who face competitive elections may vote in a manner consistent with constituent opinion even when their own views differ, and that single-member districts, experience seeking reelection, and narrow vote margins, among other factors, encourage such strategic voting.
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 examines 208 judicial elections from 1990–2000, finding that voters appear to evaluate challengers’ qualifications and that experienced challengers lessen the electoral security of incumbents.
This empirical study of Kansas trial judges—some of whom are chosen by competitive partisan elections and some of whom are chosen by noncompetitive retention elections—concludes that electoral competitiveness motivates trial judges to sentence criminal offenders more harshly.
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.
Article examines whether judges decide cases based strictly on law or whether they fit the law to their preferences; and it argues that, while the options present a false dichotomy, there is reason to prefer the law based model beyond court legitimacy.