Reducing partisanship in judicial elections can improve judge quality: Evidence from U.S. state supreme courts
dc.contributor.author
Ash, Elliott
dc.contributor.author
MacLeod, W. Bentley
dc.date.accessioned
2022-12-05T12:28:22Z
dc.date.available
2021-08-22T02:48:45Z
dc.date.available
2021-08-30T14:16:14Z
dc.date.available
2022-12-05T12:28:22Z
dc.date.issued
2021-09
dc.identifier.issn
0047-2727
dc.identifier.issn
1879-2316
dc.identifier.other
10.1016/j.jpubeco.2021.104478
en_US
dc.identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/501711
dc.identifier.doi
10.3929/ethz-b-000501711
dc.description.abstract
Should technocratic public officials be selected through politics or by merit? This paper explores how selection procedures influence the quality of selected officials in the context of U.S. state supreme courts for the years 1947–1994. In a unique set of natural experiments, state governments enacted a variety of reforms making judicial elections less partisan and establishing merit-based procedures that delegate selection to experts. We compare post-reform judges to pre-reform judges in their work quality, measured by forward citations to their opinions. In this setting we can hold constant contemporaneous incentives and the portfolio of cases, allowing us to produce causal estimates under an identification assumption of parallel trends in quality by judge starting year. We find that judges selected by nonpartisan processes (nonpartisan elections or technocratic merit commissions) produce higher-quality work than judges selected by partisan elections. These results are consistent with a representative voter model in which better technocrats are selected when the process has less partisan bias or better information regarding candidate ability.
en_US
dc.format
application/pdf
en_US
dc.language.iso
en
en_US
dc.publisher
Elsevier
en_US
dc.rights.uri
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subject
Politicians vs bureaucrats
en_US
dc.subject
Judicial performance
en_US
dc.subject
Electoral incentives
en_US
dc.title
Reducing partisanship in judicial elections can improve judge quality: Evidence from U.S. state supreme courts
en_US
dc.type
Journal Article
dc.rights.license
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
dc.date.published
2021-08-16
ethz.journal.title
Journal of Public Economics
ethz.journal.volume
201
en_US
ethz.pages.start
104478
en_US
ethz.size
22 p.
en_US
ethz.version.deposit
publishedVersion
en_US
ethz.identifier.wos
ethz.identifier.scopus
ethz.publication.place
Amsterdam
en_US
ethz.publication.status
published
en_US
ethz.leitzahl
ETH Zürich::00002 - ETH Zürich::00012 - Lehre und Forschung::00007 - Departemente::02045 - Dep. Geistes-, Sozial- u. Staatswiss. / Dep. of Humanities, Social and Pol.Sc.::09627 - Ash, Elliott / Ash, Elliott
en_US
ethz.leitzahl.certified
ETH Zürich::00002 - ETH Zürich::00012 - Lehre und Forschung::00007 - Departemente::02045 - Dep. Geistes-, Sozial- u. Staatswiss. / Dep. of Humanities, Social and Pol.Sc.::09627 - Ash, Elliott / Ash, Elliott
ethz.date.deposited
2021-08-22T02:48:53Z
ethz.source
SCOPUS
ethz.eth
yes
en_US
ethz.availability
Open access
en_US
ethz.rosetta.installDate
2021-08-30T14:16:21Z
ethz.rosetta.lastUpdated
2024-02-02T19:05:08Z
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true
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