Suchergebnisse

"Starting with recent transformations in the electoral landscape, including those brought about by U.S. Supreme Court rulings, this volume provides ... analyses of partisan, nonpartisan, and retention elections to state supreme courts, intermediate appellate courts, and trial courts. Topics include citizen participation, electoral competition, fundraising and spending, judicial performance evaluations, reform efforts, attack campaigns, and other organized efforts to oust judges. This volume also evaluates the impact of judicial elections on numerous aspects of American politics, including citizens' perceptions of judicial legitimacy, diversity on the bench, and the consequences of who wins on subsequent court decisions. Many of the chapters offer predictions about how judicial elections might look in the future."--

Campaign financing and party identification are generally considered to be the most important explanatory variables in determining judicial election outcomes, judicial primary elections make it possible to test the importance of other explanatory variables by controlling for party identification. The existence of both the Texas Supreme Court and Texas Court of Criminal Appeals also makes it possible to test the role of campaign financing. This article compares primary elections for these two courts of last resort by using logit analysis in an effort to explain election outcomes from 1988 until 2004. The hypothesis that differences in jurisdiction would also create systematic differences in the selection politics for these two courts was supported by the results of this study.

State judicial elections are governed by a unique set of rules that enforce longstanding norms of judicial independence by limiting how judicial candidates campaign. These rules have been a key part of recent debates over judicial elections and have been the subject of several U.S. Supreme Court cases. Regulating Judicial Elections provides the first accounting of the efficacy and consequences of such rules. C. Scott Peters re-frames debates over judicial elections by shifting away from all-or-nothing claims about threats to judicial independence and focusing instead on the trade-offs inherent in our checks and balances system. In doing so, he is able to examine the costs and benefits of state ethical restrictions. Peters finds that while some parts of state codes of conduct achieve their desired goals, others may backfire and increase the politicization of judicial elections. Moreover, modest gains in the protection of independence come at the expense of the effectiveness of elections as accountability mechanisms. These empirical findings will inform ongoing normative debates about judicial elections.