Of judicial campaigns and public sentiment « Voir Dire

Jeff Yates, Of judicial campaigns and public sentiment, Voir Dire blog, Aug. 16, 2007:

My co-author, Damon Cann, and I recently published a piece in American Politics Research on the dynamics of citizens’ support for their state courts. In our paper “Homegrown Institutional Legitimacy: Assessing Citizens’ Diffuse Support for State Courts,” we find that, among other factors affecting citizens’ perceptions of state courts, judicial elections and campaign contribution concerns were negatively associated with citizens’ views of the legitimacy of state courts.

A commenter (Mike Green) says that he's working on a dissertation about judicial elections and has found a difference between partisan and nonpartisan elections: he finds people where judicial elections are nonpartisan are not as informed about judicial issues as those where judicial elections are partisan.