The Politicization of State Judicial Elections: The Effects of New-Style Campaigns on State Court Legitimacy

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In recent years, U.S. Supreme Court decisions allowing state judges to make policy statements during campaigns for judicial offices, together with the growing economic, political, and social importance of state judicial systems and the vast sums of money being invested in judicial campaigns, have led to substantial changes in elections for state supreme courts. Both legal pundits and social scientists predict that the consequence of this new style of judicial campaigning will be the loss of legitimacy for state legal systems and courts; as citizens come to see courts as not unique -- that is, as ordinary political institutions -- the impartiality of the courts will be questioned, undermining the basic legitimacy of these institutions. These new-style judicial campaigns thus provide a propitious context for further development of theories of judicial legitimacy in the laboratories of the American states. Specifically, this project will test the hypothesis that the politicized character of judicial campaigning influences perceptions of the legitimacy of law and courts. Using a three-wave panel survey of a representative sample of citizens in the state of Texas, the research will examine whether changes in attitudes toward law and courts are a function of exposure to politicized judicial campaign advertisements. The project takes advantage of the relatively new databases of actual campaign ads, which allow the researchers to know the nature of the advertising content to which voters are exposed. Beyond the project's contributions to research infrastructure and graduate student training, the project will make the data collected available to the scholarly community with very little embargo period. In addition, the project will yield much-needed empirical evidence on the consequences of electing judges in the contemporary political environment.