Article2009

Partisan Labels and Democratic Accountability: An Analysis of State Supreme Court Abortion Decisions

Richard P. Caldarone · Brandice Canes‐Wrone · Tom S Clark

116 citations0/0 files storedThe Journal of Politics

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Judicial and Constitutional Studies Electoral Systems and Political Participation American Constitutional Law and Politics

Abstract

Various literatures indicate that partisan labels increase the accountability of elected officials. Correspondingly, advocates of nonpartisan elections claim that this procedure helps liberate officials from political influence. These arguments have been prominent in recent debates regarding the selection of judges in U.S. state courts. We suggest, conversely, that on salient issues nonpartisan elections encourage popular judicial decisions, particularly given recent developments in judicial campaigns. To test this hypothesis, we assemble a dataset that revolves around state supreme courts’ decisions on abortion cases between 1980 and 2006. The analysis—which controls for a variety of factors and uses gubernatorial decisions as a comparative tool—provides strong support for the hypothesis.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 116 citations exist upstream.

References

1958An Economic Theory of Democracy.1995Statehouse democracy: public opinion and policy in the American states 1984Contemporary Democracies: Participation, Stability, and Violence, by G. Bingham Powell, Jr.1997Abortion: Evidence of an Issue Evolution 1962Information Flow and the Stability of Partisan Attitudes 1984Predicting Supreme Court Cases Probabilistically: The Search and Seizure Cases, 1962-1981 2004Accountability and Coercion: Is Justice Blind When It Runs for Office?2001State Supreme Courts in American Democracy: Probing the Myths of Judicial Reform

Cited by

2014Representation in Municipal Government 2016Mayoral Partisanship and Municipal Fiscal Policy 2015Source Cues and Public Support for the Supreme Court 2010Judicial Independence and Retention Elections 2013Party Identification and Vote Choice in Partisan and Nonpartisan Elections 2015State Legislatures, State High Courts, and Judicial Independence: An Examination of Court-Curbing Legislation in the States

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.