Party Labels and Vote Choice in Judicial Elections
| Author | Lydia Tiede,Craig M. Burnett |
| DOI | 10.1177/1532673X14548477 |
| Published date | 01 March 2015 |
| Date | 01 March 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2014
Article
American Politics Research
2015, Vol. 43(2) 232 –254
Party Labels and Vote
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X14548477
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Elections
Craig M. Burnett1 and Lydia Tiede2
Abstract
The vast majority of states use elections to select at least some of their
judges. The chief institutional variation in these contests is whether the
candidates’ partisanship appears on the ballot. This article expands on the
extant literature with new data to examine how providing a party label
influences voters’ decisions. Using a survey experiment involving a low-
visibility state appellate court, we find that affixing party labels to judicial
candidates often helps our subjects select the candidate who is most aligned
with their own party attachment and with their policy interests—an outcome
that is especially notable for self-identified independents. We also show that
the presence of party labels reduces the effect of another cue, gender. The
results add context to the debate over the merits and drawbacks of partisan
versus nonpartisan elections.
Keywords
judicial elections, voter choice, party cues
Scholars and policymakers rigorously debate whether voters should elect
state judges and, if so, whether partisan or nonpartisan elections better serve
voters’ interests. Voter choice in judicial elections is a particularly pressing
1University of North Carolina, Wilmington, USA
2University of Houston, TX, USA
Corresponding Author:
Craig M. Burnett, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina,
Wilmington, 601 S. College Road, CB#5607, Wilmington, NC 28403-5607, USA.
Email: burnettc@uncw.edu
Burnett and Tiede
233
issue because selecting judges at the ballot box has become increasingly
common across the states. Furthermore, campaign expenditures have risen in
recent years, with about US$30 million spent on judicial races during the
2012 election cycle according to the Brennan Center for Justice (2012).
Indeed, some judicial elections are beginning to mirror other candidate con-
tests in terms of competitiveness and dollars spent (Bonneau & Hall, 2009),
but judicial elections, and especially their effect on independent voters, have
yet to receive the scholarly attention they warrant.
We expand on the existing literature concerning voter choice by testing
whether information in the form of party labels enhances voters’—and, in
particular, independent voters’—ability to choose judicial candidates who
best match their own preferences. This analysis is novel in both its approach
and inclusion of new data on the subject. First, our research uses experimen-
tal survey data on a nonpartisan judicial race for the low-visibility intermedi-
ate Appellate Court of North Carolina. Second, we provide insight into how
self-identified independent voters make decisions in partisan and nonpartisan
judicial elections—a topic of study largely ignored in the judicial campaigns
literature, despite the fact that independent voters may be decisive in deter-
mining election outcomes. Third, we test whether individuals use party labels
to align their decisions with the policy preferences of candidates. That is,
unlike previous studies, we ask respondents not only their party preferences
but also their policy stance on a controversial issue. Our findings demonstrate
that party labels help individuals select the candidate who matches their polit-
ical party and their preferred position on a salient social policy, holding par-
tisanship constant. Fourth, we demonstrate that the presence of party cues can
mute the effect of other cues, such as gender.
Judicial Elections and Reform
Selection methods vary not only by state but also by court level within a state
(for a history of the various state selection methods, see Hanssen, 2004). In
fact, the vast majority of states now use some form of election for at least one
level of their court system. As of 2012, 22 states elected all of their judges.1
While reforms are ongoing, there has been a clear shift toward replacing par-
tisan elections with nonpartisan elections or other forms of selection. The
success of these policy initiatives favoring nonpartisan elections often focus
on the accountability that elections afford while “insulating judges from the
vagaries and vicissitudes of partisan tides” (Bonneau & Hall, 2009, p. 8).
State judiciaries in North Carolina have not been immune to the various
reform waves. North Carolina switched from partisan judicial elections to
nonpartisan elections in 2002 after many failed efforts to replace partisan
234
American Politics Research 43(2)
elections with the merit plan (Bonneau & Hall, 2009, p. 108). The decision to
change from partisan to nonpartisan elections was in part due to growing
concerns of bias among judges who had to raise money for elections (Bonneau
& Hall, 2009; Goldberg, Samis, Bender, & Weiss, 2004).2
Subsequent studies examining North Carolina’s Supreme Court elections
indicate that reforms have increased competition for open seats but have
reduced competition for races where there is an incumbent, thereby strength-
ening incumbency advantage (Bonneau & Hall, 2009). Bonneau and Hall
also show (using data through 2006) that ballot rolloff in North Carolina’s
Supreme Court elections has increased since the reforms. They conclude that
nonpartisan elections will hurt voters, as they no longer have low-cost infor-
mation shortcuts. Adding to this, Reid and Moog (2011) find that the majority
of North Carolina’s voters—surveyed after North Carolina’s Supreme Court
election in November 2008—prefer having candidates’ party affiliations on
the ballots.
Voter Choice in Low-Information Judicial Elections
Judicial elections tend to be low-information affairs in which voters consider
several judicial positions with little knowledge about the candidates running.
With such low information, scholars of judicial and other low-information
elections have focused on whether cues can act as an information shortcut for
voters, helping them make informed choices. Examples of useful cues include
party labels, gender, occupation, party of appointer, endorsements, and
incumbency.
Party labels remain the most prominent cue that scholars have studied for
both high- (see Converse, 1962; Karp, 1998; Zaller, 1989, 1992) and low-
visibility elections (see Schaffner & Streb, 2002; Schaffner, Streb, & Wright,
2001). A substantial literature on judicial elections focuses on comparing par-
tisan to nonpartisan elections with regard to their relative differences in voter
preferences, turnout, and rolloff for state supreme courts (Bonneau, 2007;
Bonneau & Cann, 2011, 2013; Bonneau, Hall, & Streb, 2011; Bonneau &
Loepp, 2014; Dubois, 1979, 1984; Hall, 2001, 2014; Hall & Bonneau, 2006)
and lower appellate courts (Streb & Frederick, 2009; Streb, Fredrick, &
LaFrance, 2007). Others examine how party labels influence name-recogni-
tion (Dubois, 1979), correct candidate identification (Lovrich & Sheldon,
1983), and the ability to voice opinions about judicial candidates (Squire &
Smith, 1988).
With respect to party labels and voter choice in judicial elections, Bonneau
and Cann (2013) note that “[e]mpirical results on the effect of the nonpartisan
ballot format on vote choice in judicial elections are both more scant than on
Burnett and Tiede
235
local elections and also less consistent” (p. 4). Further complicating matters,
the findings in this limited literature comparing nonpartisan and partisan bal-
lot formats rely on either post-election surveys—which are subject to misre-
porting by respondents (see Ansolabehere, Iyengar, & Simon, 1999)—or
aggregate data—which limits the conclusions that a researcher can draw
from the analysis (for additional commentary on this problem, see Streb,
2009). Of the studies that examine judicial elections and employ individual-
level data (Dubois, 1979, 1984; Klein & Baum, 2001; Lovrich & Sheldon,
1983; Rock & Baum, 2010; Streb & Frederick, 2009), the primary focus has
been on issues unrelated to voter choice.
Experimental evidence regarding voter choice and party labels has largely
examined state supreme courts. Klein and Baum (2001) provide the most
direct test of whether party cues influence voter choice, finding that “party
affiliations on the ballot increased the probability of party-line voting” (p.
723). Using a survey experiment for the highly visible Ohio Supreme Court
election in 1998, Klein and Baum show that voters who were more likely to
identify with Republicans were less likely to vote for the Democratic candi-
date when provided with the candidates’ party affiliations. These results,
however, were not always consistent across samples, which calls into ques-
tion which result is more common (Klein & Baum, 2001, p. 720). Importantly,
Klein and Baum focus on self-identified partisans, overlooking how party
labels affect self-identified independent voters.
Similarly, Rock and Baum (2010)—using post-election surveys that also
examine races for the Ohio Supreme Court—find that the party affiliation of
candidates altered voters’ choices in a high-visibility partisan primary elec-
tion. They also show that these effects are stronger among self-identified
Republicans. They discover the opposite result in the low-visibility nonpa...
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