The Impact of Retention Systems on Judicial Behavior: a Synthetic Controls Analysis of State Supreme Courts

Abstract

Judicial selection methods have been reformed in many states over the 20th century. I will show how changing electoral institutions have influenced judicial behavior. To do this, I employ an original dataset and a causal inference methodology to estimate the impact of reforming a state’s selection system from partisan to nonpartisan elections on opinion writing behavior. I predict that justices, initially elected through partisan elections, will write more dissenting opinions once they face nonpartisan retention elections. The results suggest that electoral reform leads to justices authoring more dissenting opinions than they otherwise would have. Most who favor electoral reform posit that the removal of partisan labels increases the legitimacy of state supreme courts. However, if the demise of consensual norms on courts threatens their legitimacy, then electoral reform appears to have a counter-intuitive outcome. This article contributes to our understanding of how elections impact judicial behavior.