Do suffer discrimination in academe? In Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty, Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte argue that conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats. Using a survey of 1643 faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities, they conclude that their results are with the hypothesis that political conservatism confers a disadvantage in the competition for political advancement. In this response, we show that Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte's work is plagued by theoretical and methodological problems that render their conclusions unsustainable by the available evidence. Furthermore, we offer an alternative hypothesis theoretically consistent with their findings. Unfortunately, we were unable to subject our alternative hypothesis to empirical assessment (or even to replicate the initial results of Rothman, Lichter and Nevitte) since they have refused to make their data available to the scientific community.
For years, scholars of elections have argued about whether campaign finance limitations adversely affect electoral competition. In this article, we examine how the institutional campaign finance restrictions differentially affect the performance of incumbents and challengers. Using elections for the state high court bench between 1990-2004, we demonstrate that candidate spending in judicial elections has diminishing marginal returns, but that the returns to challenger spending diminish more slowly than incumbent spending. Since this is the case, campaign finance restrictions that limit candidate spending dispropor- tionately harm challengers, increasing the incumbency advantage and decreasing electoral competition. That is, states with more stringent contribution limits have lower levels of candidate spending, and the restrictions thus put challengers at a competitive disadvantage.
This project evaluates whether television advertising and the changing electoral climate brought about by Republican Party of Minnesota v. White (2002) have had detrimental effects on voting in state supreme court elections. Almost universally, judicial elections - particularly expensive campaigns using attack advertising - are being condemned for having deleterious effects on citizens, judges, and courts. In fact, the consequences are believed to be so severe that leading advocacy groups are seeking to eliminate the practice of electing judges altogether. We examine these serious contentions by evaluating: 1) whether voters are “turned off” by aggressive campaigns and thus decline to vote and 2) whether broad interpretations of White have reduced citizen participation by poisoning the electoral climate with political messages and other campaign activities unbefitting judges. In doing so, we control for factors beyond campaigns that influence the propensity to vote. Our specific focus is on partisan and nonpartisan supreme court elections from 2002 through 2006. We also use CMAG advertising data and official campaign finance reports, to distinguish the effects of campaign spending generally from television advertising in particular. Overall, we find no evidence that citizen participation is influenced by advertising exposure or by contrast or promote ads. Voting also is not influenced by broad interpretations of White allowing greater latitude for political speech. However, attack ads increase citizen participation. These findings of the mobilizing effects of attack advertising highlight the striking similarities between supreme court elections and elections to other important legislative and executive offices and add to a formidable body of empirical evidence demonstrating that the sharp attacks on judicial elections merit careful scrutiny and critical reassessment.
In this paper, we investigate one highly significant aspect of the role of money in judicial elections: whether campaign spending increases citizen participation in the recruitment and retention of judges. Specifically, by using a two-stage modeling strategy that allows us to separate the mobilizing effects of challengers from the effects of money, we assess systematically whether relatively expensive campaigns improve the chances that citizens will vote in the 260 supreme court elections held from 1990 through 2004 in eighteen states using partisan or nonpartisan elections to staff the high court bench. We find that increased spending significantly improves citizen participation in these races. Whether measured as the overall spending in each election or in per capita terms, greater spending facilitates voting. We conclude, contrary to conventional wisdom about the deleterious effects of money in judicial elections, that campaign spending should serve as a means to enhance perceptions of courts by involving greater proportions of voters in the electoral process - perhaps the most powerful legitimacy conferring institution in democracy. Rather than alienating voters, expensive campaigns should strengthen the critical linkage between citizens and the bench by giving voters greater ownership in the outcomes of these races.
Preface Brandon L. Bartels and Chris W. Bonneau. Part I: The Enterprise of Normative Implications of Empirical Research 1. The Normative Implications of Empirical Research: A Research Agenda Chris W. Bonneau and Brandon L. Bartels 2. Some Ideas on How Political Scientists Can Develop Real World Implications from Their Research (Without Becoming Policy Wonks or Law Professors) Lee Epstein, Jack Knight, and Andrew Martin 3. The Rule of Law as a Law of Rules Barry Friedman Part II: Law and Decisionmaking 4. Judicial Behavior and the Counter-Majoritarian Difficulty Lawrence Baum 5. On Substance and Rhetoric in Constitutional Law Jamal Greene 6. The Role of Courts in the Policy Making Process Ian Turner 7. Racial Logic in Judicial Decision-Making: The Legal Reproduction of White Domination Wendy Moore Part III: Judicial Selection 8. Advice and Consent in a Polarized Era: Time to Pull a Normative Alarm Sarah Binder 9. The Different Manifestations of Representative Drift on U.S. State and Federal Courts Justine D'Elia and Jeffrey Segal 10. The Use and Abuse of Empirical Evidence in Support of Normative Arguments on Judicial Selection Charles Geyh 11. Bridging the Gap Between Science and Politics: The Judicial Elections Controversy Melinda Gann Hall 12. Unpacking the Debate on Judicial Appointments Outside the United States: What Research Might Be Able to Contribute to the Normative Conversation Lori Hausegger and Troy Riddell Part IV: Courts in the Broader Political and Societal Context 13. The Normative Element of Legitimacy David Klein 14. Can the U.S. Supreme Court Have Too Much Legitimacy? James Gibson and Michael Nelson 15. Normative Implications of Government Noncompliance with Court Orders David Hausman 16. The Relationship between Diversity on the Bench and the Legitimacy of the U.S. Courts Nancy Scherer 17. Day-to-Day Legitimacy: First Instance Forums Broadly Construed Herbert Kritzer Part V: Conclusion 18. A Path Forward Brandon L .Bartels and Chris W. Bonneau
