Examining Partisan and Nonpartisan Judicial Elections

• In Event: State Judicial Elections and Their Consequences

Abstract

When states change from nonpartisan to partisan judicial elections or vice versa, do they experience changes in their campaign rhetoric and judicial opinions? The Arkansas and North Carolina state supreme courts serve as case studies of this phenomenon. In 2000, Arkansas changed from partisan judicial elections to nonpartisan elections. In 2016, North Carolina changed from nonpartisan judicial elections to partisan elections. Bridging literature on judicial election reform and political speech in the judiciary, this paper assesses the nuances of judicial rhetoric when election laws change and cause voters to get more or less access to information about judicial candidates

This paper hypothesizes that Arkansas became more emotional and ideological in its rhetoric due to the judicial candidates’ pressures to demonstrate their views, and that North Carolina maintained the same level of emotional and ideological tone. Using naïve Bayes classifier for text analysis, I evaluate whether a state’s judicial selection method influences the emotional content and ideological rhetoric of their election ads and the ideological language of their opinions.

My preliminary analysis shows that changes in judicial selection methods do not affect the rhetoric in Arkansas and North Carolina but does indicate that opinions from the Kentucky State Supreme Court became more conservative since 2000 and opinions from the Texas State Supreme Court and Criminal Appellate Court became more liberal since 2016. These results suggest that other factors may influence changes in rhetoric beyond judicial selection method. This paper will refine the analyses performed in the preliminary study. Instead of using automated text analysis tools, such as Wordscores and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), I will use the naïve Bayes classifier technique to score the emotional and ideological content of the ads and opinions. I will separate opinions into categories of majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions and subset the cases to criminal cases, as those are often the most ideologically divisive on the state supreme court level. I conclude with a discussion on how judicial candidates leverage the increasing acceptance of political rhetoric in the midst of campaigning for voters and serving their constituents.

Author

• Marcy Shieh, University of Wisconsin-Madison