Judicial Elections in 21st Century by Chris W Bonneau & Melinda Gann Hall

Author:Chris W Bonneau & Melinda Gann Hall [Bonneau, Chris W & Hall, Melinda Gann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138185890
Google: 0X1ljwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 29156561
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Campaign Spending

The topic of how state judicial elections are financed has generated enormous controversy in recent years. This normative debate has unfolded while empirical understanding of how much money gets raised and spent in judicial campaigns has expanded enormously. Whereas the bulk of this research has been devoted to state supreme court races (e.g., Bonneau 2007) there have been advances in understanding these dynamics at the IAC level as well (Frederick and Streb 2008, 2011; Streb and Frederick 2011). This section of the chapter updates the findings of Streb and Frederick through the 2014 election cycle.

Earlier research uncovered no noticeable increase in the level of campaign spending for IAC elections in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Republican Party of Minnesota v. White (2002), which declared unconstitutional judicial canons that prevented judicial candidates from announcing their views on issues (Bonneau, Hall, and Streb 2011). The concern among some scholars and judicial reform organizations was that the White ruling would usher in a new era of increased campaign spending because campaigns would be overtly political. The data in Figure 7.6 include the mean amount of campaign spending by individual candidates in contested IAC races adjusted for inflation (in 2014 dollars) for the 1999–2014 period.7 These data corroborate previous research that spending has not increased noticeably over the past few cycles and, if anything, is on a downward trajectory. The high point for campaign spending in the series occurred during the 1999–2000 cycle, with a mean of $248,554 for candidates in that period (ironically before the White ruling in 2002). That average fell to $113,119 in the 2011–2012 cycle and only slightly increased to $131,473 in 2013–2014. While there may be year-to-year variations in the amount of money candidates in IAC races spend, there is no consistent pattern that emerges from the data.

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