Turnover and Accountability of Appointed and Elected Judges

Abstract

Reseña:We propose a novel empirical framework for comparing two different political institutions,focusing on selection and retention of state court judges in the U.S. Under one system, whenthere is an open seat, the governor appoints a new judge; when the term of the judge expires,he faces an up-or-down majority decision by voters, without facing challengers. Under theother system, judges are selected and re-elected through competitive elections. We estimate adynamic model to quantify the degree of reelection concerns imposed on judges’ decisions andto jointly analyze underlying preferences of judges, using individual-level criminal sentencingand reelection data.We propose a novel empirical framework for comparing two different political institutions, focusing on selection and retention of state court judges in the U.S. Under one system, when there is an open seat, the governor appoints a new judge; when the term of the judge expires, he faces an up-or-down majority decision by voters, without facing challengers. Under the other system, judges are selected and re-elected through competitive elections. We estimate a dynamic model to quantify the degree of reelection concerns imposed on judges’ decisions and to jointly analyze underlying preferences of judges, using individual-level criminal sentencing and reelection data.