The Judge, the Politician, and the Press: Newspaper Coverage and Criminal Sentencing across Electoral Systems

Lim, Claire S. H.; Snyder, James M.; Strömberg, David

doi:10.1257/app.20140111

Cited by 90 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(38 reference statements)

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“…1 We also relate to the literature on media and accountability, particularly in the United States, such as Snyder and Strömberg (2010), and Lim, Snyder, and Strömberg (2014). Our evidence is very much consistent with their finding that a disconnect between media markets and political jurisdictions weakens accountability.…”

Section: Figuresupporting

confidence: 78%

Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability, and Corruption: Evidence from US States

Campante¹,

2014

American Economic Review

161

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Corruption is widely seen as a major problem, in developing and developed countries alike, and much has been written on its determinants and correlates. This paper pursues the first systematic investigation of a hitherto underappreciated element in this story: the spatial distribution of the population in a given polity of interest, relative to the seat of political power.This spatial distribution might affect the incentives and opportunities for public officials to misuse their office for private gain. In particular, it may affect the degree of accountability, as has long been noted in the particular context of US state politics. For instance, Wilson's (1966) seminal contribution argued that state-level politics were particularly prone to corruption because state capitals are often far from the major metropolitan centers, and thus face a lower level of scrutiny by citizens and by the media: these isolated capitals have "small-city newspapers, few (and weak) * Campante: Harvard Kennedy School, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, and NBER (e-mail: filipe_ campante@harvard.edu); Do: Department of Economics and LIEPP, Sciences Po Paris, 28 rue des Saints-Pères, 75007 Paris, France (e-mail: quocanh.do@sciencespo.fr). We are grateful to three anonymous referees for many helpful suggestions. We also thank

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Section: Figuresupporting

confidence: 78%

Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability, and Corruption: Evidence from US States

Campante¹,

2014

American Economic Review

161

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“…While some earlier work finds that electoral proximity affects judicial votes, these studies focus on the more salient issues of criminal sentencing (e.g., Huber & Gordon ; Gordon & Huber ; Berdejó & Yuchtman ) and the death penalty (e.g., Canes‐Wrone et al ). Moreover, even some work on criminal sentencing fails to find a significant association with electoral proximity (e.g., Lim et al ).…”

Section: Specifications and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Research on trial courts also compares among types of selection systems although the election environment for these judges is typically quite different in scale than that for a state supreme court position (e.g., Gordon & Huber ; Lim ; Lim et al ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Judicial Elections, Public Opinion, and Decisions on Lower‐Salience Issues

Canes‐Wrone¹,

Clark²,

Semet³

2018

J Empirical Legal Studies

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Scholarship finds that in states with judicial elections, public opinion affects judges’ decisions on hot‐button campaign issues such as the death penalty or marijuana legalization. Yet the literature leaves open the question of how public opinion affects judicial decisions on less salient issues, which not only dominate the dockets of state supreme courts but also encompass areas of major legal and policy significance. We consider one such issue that infrequently emerges in judicial campaigns, environmental law. Specifically, we collect an original dataset of over 5,000 judicial votes on nearly 1,000 cases heard in 40 state supreme courts from 1990–2014. We find that for the dataset as a whole, there is not a significant effect of public opinion on judicial decisions in any of the major judicial selection systems. However, in the few states in which environmental issues have been the subject of campaign attack ads, we find evidence of such a relationship during the years following the ads. These results contribute to a growing literature that suggests elections can reduce judicial independence from public opinion.

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“…A one-standard deviation increase in congruence (which is associated with approximately 50 additional articles per congressional session) increases per capita federal spending by 3%. Similarly, Lim et al (2015) study the effect of newspaper coverage of US state trial court judges, using the congruence between judicial districts and newspaper markets to identify effects. They find that press coverage significantly increases sentence length.…”

Section: Politicians and Policymentioning

confidence: 99%