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The Impact of High-Visibility Contests for U.S. State Court Judgeships: Partisan Voting in Nonpartisan Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

Emily Rock  and
Lawrence Baum
Emily Rock
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
Lawrence Baum
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Abstract

Over the past two decades, campaigns for judicial elections in the U.S. states have become larger in scale. We analyze the impact of this development on voters' choices between candidates. Using a series of post-election surveys of voters in fourteen contests for the Ohio Supreme Court over twenty years, we probe the relationship between the amount of media coverage and campaign spending in a contest and the level of partisan voting. We find that in a state in which candidates' party affiliations are not listed on the ballot, high-visibility contests for judgeships produce more partisan voting than do lower-visibility contests. That effect was more pronounced for voters with greater political knowledge. These findings indicate that, at least in one state setting, high-visibility judicial contests have the effect of making more voters aware of basic information about the candidates, and that information informs their voting choices.

Type
Research Article
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , Winter 2010 , pp. 368 - 396
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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