Mobilizing Interest: The Effects of Money on Citizen Participation in State Supreme Court Elections

Hall, Melinda Gann; Bonneau, Chris W.

doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2008.00323.x

Cited by 54 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 40 publications

(76 reference statements)

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“…Spending by candidates and special interest groups in all states with judicial elections dramatically increased in recent years (Bonneau, 2005;Hall & Bonneau, 2009). A positive correlation has also been found between spending on judicial campaigns and citizen participation rates in state supreme court elections regardless of whether the balloting was partisan or non-partisan (Hall & Bonneau 2008). It should also be noted that research has identified a correlation between campaign contributions and judicial decisions in Texas courts, with judges voting conservatively on landmark cases and in cases in the months prior to an election (McCall & McCall, 2007).…”

Section: Judicial Elections: An Overview and Discussion Of Important mentioning

confidence: 99%

An Exploratory Analysis of Judicial Elections in Texas: Does Subject Matter Jurisdiction Matter?

Monroe¹,

Mitchell²,

Payne³

2015

JPL

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The existence of both the Texas Supreme Court and Texas Court of Criminal Appeals makes it possible to test several important hypotheses of elections held between 1988 and 2008 using a variety of statistical tools related to the impact that subject matter jurisdiction (civil versus criminal) has on the outcomes of an election. In this comparative analysis, this article shows that the factors that influence election outcomes for seats on one court are different than those factors that influence outcomes on the other. New information is learned about the importance of demographic variables, judicial or legislative experience, and performance in the state bar poll.

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Section: Judicial Elections: An Overview and Discussion Of Important mentioning

confidence: 99%

An Exploratory Analysis of Judicial Elections in Texas: Does Subject Matter Jurisdiction Matter?

Monroe¹,

Mitchell²,

Payne³

2015

JPL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As empirical research has demonstrated, voter apathy is not inherent in state supreme court elections (e.g., Baum and Klein 2007;Hall 2007b;Hall and Bonneau 2008). Instead, citizen participation is driven primarily by factors that increase the salience of these races and provide information to voters (Baum and Klein 2007;Hall 2007b;Hojnacki and Baum 1992).…”

Section: Empirical Studies Of State Supreme Court Electionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Instead, citizen participation is driven primarily by factors that increase the salience of these races and provide information to voters (Baum and Klein 2007;Hall 2007b;Hojnacki and Baum 1992). Particularly effective as mobilizing agents are partisan elections, quality challengers, tight margins of victory, and big spending (Baum and Klein 2007;Hall 2007b;Hall and Bonneau 2008).…”

Section: Empirical Studies Of State Supreme Court Electionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Representation in State Supreme Courts

Hall

2013

Political Research Quarterly

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This research capitalizes on the analytical opportunity created by mandatory retirement provisions to explore the nature of the electoral connection in state supreme courts and to illustrate how changes in institutional context can modify the decisional propensities of political elites and reshape their fundamental roles. Specifically, this work demonstrates that mandatory retirement obviates the representative function by disconnecting key mechanisms through which public preferences are translated into judicial votes: threat conditions that elevate the risk of electoral censure. In state supreme courts, popular votes are in part strategic and result from a complex interaction of goals, institutions, and external pressures.

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“…The 2004 and 2008 elections saw especially increased expenditures per voter accompanied by a noticable increase in voter turnout. Given the relationship between campaign spending and turnout, campaigns are well advised to spend money on mobilizing voters (Baek 2009;Hall and Bonneau 2008). However, as campaigns increasingly face limited resources and budget constraints (in addition to public sentiment against excessive spending during times of economic hardship), it is important to allocate resources as efficiently as possible.…”

Section: Campaigning Mobilization and Turnout In The United Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Influencing Elections with Statistics: Targeting Voters with Logistic Regression Trees

Rusch

Lee²,

Hornik

et al. 2012

SSRN Journal

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Political campaigning has become a multi-million dollar business. A substantial proportion of a campaign's budget is spent on voter mobilization, i.e., on identifying and influencing as many people as possible to vote. Based on data, campaigns use statistical tools to provide a basis for deciding who to target. While the data available is usually rich, campaigns have traditionally relied on a rather limited selection of information, often including only previous voting behavior and one or two demographical variables. Statistical procedures that are currently in use include logistic regression or standard classification tree methods like CHAID, but there is a growing interest in employing modern data mining approaches. Along the lines of this development, we propose a modern framework for voter targeting called LORET (for logistic regression trees) that employs trees (with possibly just a single root node) containing logistic regressions (with possibly just an intercept) in every leaf. Thus, they contain logistic regression and classification trees as special cases and allow for a synthesis of both techniques under one umbrella. We explore various flavors of LORET models that (a) compare the effect of using the full set of available variables against using only limited information and (b) investigate their varying effects either as regressors in the logistic model components or as partitioning variables in the tree components. To assess model performance and illustrate targeting, we apply LORET to a data set of 19,634 eligible voters from the 2004 US presidential election. We find that augmenting the standard set of variables (such as age and voting history) together with additional predictor variables (such as the household composition in terms of party affiliation and each individual's rank in the household) clearly improves predictive accuracy. We also find that LORET models based on tree induction outbeat the unpartitioned competitors. Additionally, LORET models using both partitioning variables and regressors in the resulting nodes can improve the efficiency of allocating campaign resources while still providing intelligible models.

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Mobilizing Interest: The Effects of Money on Citizen Participation in State Supreme Court Elections

Cited by 54 publications

References 40 publications

An Exploratory Analysis of Judicial Elections in Texas: Does Subject Matter Jurisdiction Matter?

An Exploratory Analysis of Judicial Elections in Texas: Does Subject Matter Jurisdiction Matter?

Representation in State Supreme Courts

Influencing Elections with Statistics: Targeting Voters with Logistic Regression Trees

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