Chief Justice Selection Rules and Judicial Ideology

Abstract

We examine how institutional selection procedures affect the ideology of state supreme court chief justices. We argue that institutional selection methods empower those charged with choosing chief justices to select court leaders who reflect their own preferences, and we test this theory using data from all 50 American states from 1970 to 2017. Our results show that states that use popular elections to select chief justices tend to produce court leaders whose preferences reflect the electorate, and states that use commission-assisted elite appointment tend to produce chief justices whose preferences mirror those of political elites. While we find that peer election systems produce leaders with preferences similar to median court preferences, court preferences are also associated with other methods of chief justice selection.