Regulating Judicial Elections: Assessing State Codes of Judicial Conduct by C. Scott Peters

Author:C. Scott Peters [Peters, C. Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Constitutional, Judicial Branch, Political Science, American Government, Law, General
ISBN: 9781317226413
Google: fhw0DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-05T13:16:00+00:00

Findings

Of the 336 candidates in the data set, 135 of them (40.2 percent) ran television ads during the course of their campaign. As one might expect, having a challenger is almost a necessary predicate to buying ad time. Only one unopposed candidate—Champ Lyons, an Alabama incumbent running in 2006—ran television advertising during his reelection bid. Because of this, I exclude from the remainder of the analysis candidates who ran unopposed. Table 4.2 provides a summary of some key descriptive findings. As one can see, nearly half (47.2 percent) of all candidates facing an opponent ran television ads. Also, nearly every state holding state supreme court elections saw television advertising at least once during this time period; the only states that did not were Minnesota and North Dakota. Even among those candidates who do advertise, a fairly large share of them run few ads. Even in the most competitive electoral environments (partisan elections) or where the candidate has the most advantages (incumbents), a quarter of candidates who run ads air only about 200 to 300 airings during the course of the campaign. The summary in Table 4.2 also highlights the fact that advertising was somewhat more common among candidates in partisan elections. Looking beyond the results summarized in Table 4.2, when I examined only contested elections, more than 51 percent of candidates in partisan or quasi-partisan elections ran ads compared to only 43.7 percent in states where the parties play no formal role in the electoral process. Indeed, contested candidates in these states were not only more likely to run ads, but also they ran, on average, about four times as many ads as did their colleagues in nonpartisan elections. The findings in Table 4.2 also stress the importance of competitiveness: open-seat candidates, who are almost always likely to be involved in competitive races, are significantly more likely than other candidates to utilize television advertising in their campaigns.

Table 4.2 Candidate Advertising: Descriptive Statistics

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