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

近年来，美国最高法院允许州法官在竞选司法职位期间发表政策声明的决定，加上州司法系统日益增长的经济、政治和社会重要性，以及在司法活动中投入的大量资金，导致州最高法院选举发生了重大变化。法律专家和社会科学家都预测，这种新的司法竞选风格的后果将是国家法律体系和法院失去合法性；随着公民开始将法院视为不是独一无二的--也就是普通的政治机构--法院的公正性将受到质疑，破坏这些机构的基本合法性。因此，这些新型的司法运动为美国各州的实验室进一步发展司法合法性理论提供了有利的背景。具体地说，这个项目将检验这样一种假设，即司法运动的政治化特征影响了人们对法律和法院合法性的看法。通过对德克萨斯州具有代表性的公民样本进行三波小组调查，这项研究将检验人们对法律和法院态度的变化是否与接触政治化的司法竞选广告有关。该项目利用了相对较新的实际竞选广告数据库，使研究人员能够了解选民接触到的广告内容的性质。除了该项目对研究基础设施和研究生培训的贡献外，该项目还将向学术界提供收集的数据，而禁运期非常短。此外，该项目还将就选举法官在当代政治环境中产生的后果提供亟需的经验证据。

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.