What Price Justice(s)? Understanding Campaign Spending in State Supreme Court Elections

2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris W. Bonneau
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
Campaign Spending ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
The Past ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
American Elections

Among the least-researched American elections are those for seats on the states' supreme courts, arguably some of the most important political positions in the states. We know not only that campaign spending in these races has increased sharply in the past 20 years but also that there is great variation in spending among them. What factors cause campaign spending to vary among races for the states' highest courts? And what can an understanding of campaign spending in these races tell us about campaign spending for other offices? I use data from 281 state supreme court races in 21 states from 1990 to 2000 to answer these questions. I find that state supreme court campaign spending is driven by the characteristics of the race, institutional arrangements, and the electoral and state supreme court context.

scholarly journals The Complicated Business of State Supreme Court Elections: An Empirical Perspective

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Heise
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Judicial Elections ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Proper Role ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Judicial Outcomes

Proponents of judicial elections and related campaign activities emphasize existing First Amendment jurisprudence as well as similarities linking publicly-elected state judges and other publicly-elected state officials. Opponents focus on judicial campaign contributions’ corrosive effects, including their potential to unduly influence judicial outcomes. Using a comprehensive data set of 2,345 business-related cases decided by state supreme courts across all fifty states between 2010–12, judicial election critics, including Professor Joanna Shepherd, emphasize the potential for bias and find that campaign contributions from business sources to state supreme court judicial candidates corresponded with candidates’ pro-business votes as justices. While Shepherd’s main findings generally replicate, additional (and alternative) analyses introduce new findings that raise complicating wrinkles for Shepherd’s strong normative claims. Findings from this study illustrate that efforts to influence judicial outcomes are not the exclusive domain of business interests. That is, judicial campaign contributions from non- (and anti-) business interests increase the probability of justices’ votes favoring non-business interests. As a result, critiques of judicial elections cannot properly rely exclusively on the influence of business interests. Moreover, that both business and non-business interests can successfully influence judicial outcomes through campaign contributions point in different (and possibly conflicting) normative directions. On the one hand, even if one agrees that the judicial branch qualitatively differs from the political and executive branches in terms of assessing campaign contributions’ proper role, that the potential to influence judicial outcomes is available to any interest group (willing to invest campaign contributions) complicates popular critiques of judicial elections. On the other hand, the same empirical findings also plausibly strengthen critiques of judicial elections, especially for those who view the judicial domain differently than other political domains.

Supreme Court Elections: How Much They Have Changed, Why They Changed, and What Difference It Makes

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (03) ◽  
pp. 900-923 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Baum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Community ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Electoral Campaigns ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Selection Systems

This essay draws on four recent studies of elections to state supreme courts in the United States to probe widely perceived changes in the scale and content of electoral campaigns for seats on state supreme courts. 1 Evidence from these studies and other sources indicates that changes have indeed occurred, though they are more limited than most commentaries suggest. These changes stem most directly from trends in state supreme court policy that have attracted interest-group activity, especially from the business community. Like their extent, the effects of change in supreme court campaigns have been meaningful although exaggerated by many observers. What we have learned about changes in supreme court elections has implications for choices among selection systems, but those implications are mixed and complex.

scholarly journals 2017 Monsanto Lecture: The Complicated Business of State Supreme Court Elections: An Empirical Perspective

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Heise
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Judicial Elections ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Proper Role ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Judicial Outcomes

52 Valparaiso University Law Review 19 (2017).Proponents of judicial elections and related campaign activities emphasize existing First Amendment jurisprudence as well as similarities linking publicly elected state judges and other publicly-elected state officials. Opponents focus on judicial campaign contributions’ corrosive effects, including their potential to unduly influence judicial outcomes. Using a comprehensive data set of 2,345 business-related cases decided by state supreme courts across all fifty states between 2010–12, judicial election critics, including Professor Joanna Shepherd, emphasize the potential for bias and find that campaign contributions from business sources to state supreme court judicial candidates corresponded with candidates’ pro-business votes as justices. While Shepherd’s main findings generally replicate, additional (and alternative) analyses introduce new findings that raise complicating wrinkles for Shepherd’s strong normative claims. Findings from this study illustrate that efforts to influence judicial outcomes are not the exclusive domain of business interests. That is, judicial campaign contributions from non- (and anti-) business interests increase the probability of justices’ votes favoring non-business interests. As a result, critiques of judicial elections cannot properly rely exclusively on the influence of business interests. Moreover, that both business and non-business interests can successfully influence judicial outcomes through campaign contributions point in different (and possibly conflicting) normative directions. On the one hand, even if one agrees that the judicial branch qualitatively differs from the political and executive branches in terms of assessing campaign contributions’ proper role, that the potential to influence judicial outcomes is available to any interest group (willing to invest campaign contributions) complicates popular critiques of judicial elections. On the other hand, the same empirical findings also plausibly strengthen critiques of judicial elections, especially for those who view the judicial domain differently than other political domains.

scholarly journals Estimating Dynamic Ideal Points for State Supreme Courts

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason H. Windett ◽  
Jeffrey J. Harden ◽  
Matthew E. K. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Superior Performance ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Common Space ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Ideal Points ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Measurement Strategies

Courts of last resort in the American states offer researchers considerable leverage to develop and test theories about how institutions influence judicial behavior. One measure critical to this research agenda is the individual judges' preferences, or ideal points, in policy space. Two main strategies for recovering this measure exist in the literature: Brace, Langer, and Hall's (2000, Measuring preferences of state supreme court judges,Journal of Politics62(2):387–413) Party-Adjusted Judge Ideology and Bonica and Woodruff's (2014, A common-space measure of state supreme court ideology,Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, doi: 10.1093/jleo/ewu016) judicial CFscores. Here, we introduce a third measurement strategy that combines CFscores with item response (IRT) estimates of judicial voting behavior in all fifty-two state courts of last resort from 1995 to 2010. We show that leveraging two distinct sources of information (votes and CFscores) yields a superior estimation strategy. Specifically, we highlight several key advantages of the combined measure: (1) it is estimated dynamically, allowing for the possibility that judges' ideological leanings change over time and (2) it maps judges into a common space. In a comparison against existing measurement strategies, we find that our measure offers superior performance in predicting judges' votes. We conclude that it is a valuable tool for advancing the study of judicial politics.

Challenges to the Impartiality of State Supreme Courts: Legitimacy Theory and “New-Style” Judicial Campaigns

2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES L. GIBSON
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
State Legislature ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
State Courts ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Institutional Legitimacy ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Campaign Activity ◽  
Free Speech Rights

Institutional legitimacy is perhaps the most important political capital courts possess. Many believe, however, that the legitimacy of elected state courts is being threatened by the rise of politicized judicial election campaigns and the breakdown of judicial impartiality. Three features of such campaigns, the argument goes, are dangerous to the perceived impartiality of courts: campaign contributions, attack ads, and policy pronouncements by candidates for judicial office. By means of an experimental vignette embedded in a representative survey, I investigate whether these factors in fact compromise the legitimacy of courts. The survey data indicate that campaign contributions and attack ads do indeed lead to a diminution of legitimacy, in courts just as in legislatures. However, policy pronouncements, even those promising to make decisions in certain ways, have no impact whatsoever on the legitimacy of courts and judges. These results are strongly reinforced by the experiment's ability to compare the effects of these campaign factors across institutions (a state Supreme Court and a state legislature). Thus, this analysis demonstrates that legitimacy is not obdurate and that campaign activity can indeed deplete the reservoir of goodwill courts typically enjoy, even if the culprit is not the free-speech rights the U.S. Supreme Court announced in 2002.

scholarly journals American State Supreme Court Justices, 1900-1970

1984 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 371-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Kagan ◽  
Bobby D. Infelise ◽  
Robert R. Detlefsen
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Law Firms ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Career Line ◽  
Big City ◽  
Political Office ◽  
Statistical Relationships ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
American State

What are the paths that lead to the state supreme court bench? If we can identify these paths, can we then determine that they produce distinctive patterns in a court3 decision making? Based on a study of 694 judges who sat on 16selected American state supreme courts between 1900 and 1970, this article finds that the appellate judiciary was drawn from a variety of legal and political backgrounds rather than from any single career line. The judges came from both non-elite and elite law schools. About half had no substantial lower court judicial experience. Over one-third had been public prosecutors, another third had held other elective political office, and only a small minority had practiced in multilawyer big-city law firms. The article reports changes over time in these and other judicial characteristics (such CIS age, turnover, political party affiliations) and describes interstate differences. Few significant statistical relationships are found, however, between the background characteristics of judges and selected characteristics of state supreme court opinions.

State Supreme Courts and Public Policy: A Bibliography

1981 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
G.Alan Tarr
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
School Finance ◽  
Life Support ◽  
Plea Bargaining ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
State Supreme Court

During the past decade political scientists have become increasingly aware that state supreme courts make major contributions to public policy. Various highly publicized decisions concerning, for example, school finance, the termination of life support systems, and plea bargaining have underlined the importance of state supreme court policymaking. Historical studies have documented that this policy involvement is not merely a recent phenomenon. However, the Burger Court's new federalism has invited state supreme courts to play a more active role, and many courts have availed themselves of this opportunity.Yet despite the obvious importance of state supreme court activity, research on their policymaking has lagged. In part this can be attributed to the sheer volume of cases they annually decide. Numerous law journals assist the political scientist in overcoming this difficulty by publishing annual surveys of state supreme court decisions. Listed below are journals which provide such surveys.

Toward A Positive Theory of State Supreme Court Decision Making

2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (01) ◽  
pp. 7-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo T. Spiller ◽  
Richard G. Vanden Bergh
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
The State ◽  
Court Decision ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Judicial Selection ◽  
State Supreme Court

State Supreme Courts have grown in importance during the last thirty years in the formation of public policy. Their judgements determine many aspects of constitutional law, tort reform, judicial selection, and campaign finance reform, among others. A vast body of literature has been developed that analyzes State Supreme Court decision making, which emphasizes the conditioning effects of the legal and institutional environment. This article expands on this previous work by incorporating the interaction of the judiciary with other government institutions, and applies the Positive Political Theory approach to law and legal institutions to the State Supreme Court. In addition, the neo-institutionalist literature of the selection process is incorporated to defend a systematic approach towards decision making. Towards that end, this article explores how judicial decisions are conditioned by institutional rules, resulting in a formal modeling of how the State Supreme Courts interact with political actors to form constitutional interpretation. This model includes the judicial selection process'retention or competitive reelection—and is extended to constitutional amendment rules, explaining how these two interact rather than acting independently. Finally, the hypothesis is tested that when State Supreme Court judges face retention elections and political preferences are homogeneous, the probability increases of observing constitutional amendment prosposals.

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