The Influence of Appointment and Retention Constituencies: Testing Strategies of Judicial Decisionmaking

In: State politics & policy quarterly: the official journal of the State Politics and Policy Section of the American Political Science Association, Band 7, Heft 4, S. 394-415

Abstract

Recent studies (Brace and Hall 1990, 1995, 1997; Hall 1987, 1992; Hall and Brace 1989) have demonstrated that state supreme court judges' decisionmaking is influenced by the type of selection mechanism that put them into office. In particular, judges are found to respond to the interests of those who have placed them on the bench. We extend this line of inquiry further by testing the effect of rules governing the retention of these judges in merit systems. Do these judges respond to the subtle differences in constituency that these rules establish? We address this question with a larger dataset than that used in previous studies of decisionmaking (Brace and Hall 1995, 1997; Hall 1987, 1992), and we find overwhelming evidence of the effects of these retention rules. In fact, we also conclude that judicial decisions are more influenced by the actor charged with retaining them than the actor who placed them on the bench in the first place. Adapted from the source document.