We report the results of an experiment designed to replicate and extend recent findings on motivated political reasoning. In particular, we are interested in disconfirmation biases-the tendency to counter-argue or discount information with which one disagrees-in the processing of political arguments on policy issues. Our experiment examines 8 issues, including some of local relevance and some of national relevance, and manipulates the presentation format of the policy arguments. We find strong support for our basic disconfirmation hypothesis: people seem unable to ignore their prior beliefs when processing arguments or evidence. We also find that this bias is moderated by political sophistication and strength of prior attitude. We do not find, however, that argument type matters, suggesting that motivated biases are quite robust to changes in argument format. Finally, we find strong support for the polarization of attitudes as a consequence of biased processing.Research on the motivated processing of political arguments has shown that we should not expect citizens to approach political arguments or evidence evenhandedly (Lebo and

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As state judicial campaigns become progressively more expensive and political, judicial candidates have turned more frequently to lawyers and law firms for campaign contributions. Given that lawyers who contribute to judges' campaigns frequently appear before them in court, the potential for a conflict of interest arises. I ask whether judges are more likely to rule in favor of attorneys who provide financial support to their campaigns. Looking at cases decided in the Supreme Court of Georgia's 2003 term, I show that campaign contributions are indeed correlated with judges' decisions. Furthermore, I use a two-stage probit least squares estimator to show that these campaign contributions directly affect judicial decisionmaking.

Critics traditionally portray state Supreme Court elections as low-information events that fail to accomplish the stated goal of engendering accountability to the public. Recent changes in the intensity of contestable judicial elections have led scholars to consider the effect of public opinion on state court decision making. We delineate necessary conditions for judicial responsiveness to public opinion, integrating research on state court decision making with the broader literature on representation. We then empirically test our framework for judicial responsiveness. Our findings suggest that the strength of the electoral connection between state supreme court justices and their constituents is quite dependent on method of judicial retention and the visibility of the case.