In this impressive work, Herbert M. Kritzer collects and analyzes county-level vote data for all state supreme court elections from 1946 to 2013. It is hard to state just how difficult this data-collection process must have been; it took years of perseverance, creativity, and commitment. And as a result, the scholarly community now has access to a most impressive data set.
While the data collection is impressive in its own right, the book makes a first-rate contribution in its analysis of the data. Specifically, Kritzer sets out to answer two fundamental questions (p. 2): 1) What has changed in state supreme court elections? 2) Where have those changes occurred (and not occurred)? By looking at county-level results over 67 years, he is able to paint the most comprehensive picture to date of competition and partisanship in judicial elections.
The book begins with a nice, detailed discussion of two states that have many similarities but have taken much different paths in the nature of their judicial elections: Minnesota and Wisconsin. While both states utilize nonpartisan elections and have a similar political culture, elections in Wisconsin have become contentious, high-spending affairs, while elections in Minnesota continue to be sleepy and low profile. This is a perfect illustration of the puzzle Kritzer sets out to solve in the book. He suggests that the explanation has to do with differences in the types of cases those courts have been asked to decide. By starting the book with an accessible case study, he expertly prepares the reader for the analysis ahead.
In Chapter 3, Kritzer examines some of the alleged ills that judicial elections inflict on the justice system. Analyzing extant work by political scientists for the most part, he shows how the weight of the evidence indicates that judicial elections do not matter as much as we might think. Specifically, they do not lead to a loss of legitimacy, judges are not corrupted by campaign finance contributions, and, in most types of cases, judges do not change their votes on cases in anticipation of the public reaction (p. 85). This is not to say that judicial elections do not matter; they do. Rather, many of the charges that are leveled against them turn out to be either overblown or outright false. While there is little that is empirically new in this chapter, it serves as a useful synthesis of the current literature.
The empirical meat of the book comes in Chapters 4–7. The key finding in Chapter 4 is that changes in competition and competitiveness are largely limited to partisan elections in southern states (p. 109). Thus, despite much rhetoric to the contrary, the story of state supreme court elections is, to a great extent, one of stability. This is an important corrective to the conventional (popular and scholarly) wisdom, which assumes that state supreme court elections became much different in the 1990s. Kritzer convincingly shows that this is not true.
Chapter 5 confirms numerous other studies that campaign spending has increased over time in state supreme court elections, though most of the change happened between 1980 and 2004. Kritzer supplements his aggregate analysis with case studies of three states: Michigan, Washington, and Wisconsin. These case studies give the reader some flavor into the within-state variations that exist; it is not just about across-state variation. The overall conclusion is that it is important to note that “spending in state supreme court elections has tended to concentrate on a small number of elections in each cycle rather than being spread across a substantial proportion of seats actually contested in an election cycle” (p. 157). Like most studies, Kritzer’s analysis focuses only on candidate spending, not interest-group spending. Some may see that as a limitation, but given the unreliability of independent spending records, there is no way to include a reliable measure of it (the author's discussion using the context of Wisconsin on page 150 is a good illustration of this). Moreover, since spending by independent groups is a relatively new phenomena in most states (post-2000), Kritzer needs to exclude them in order to make comparisons over a long time period.
In Chapters 6–7, the author compares “the correlation between the county-level vote pattern in the gubernatorial election and the county-level vote pattern in the state supreme court election” (p. 171). He refers to this as “partisan correlation.” In Chapter 6, he provides persuasive evidence that state supreme court elections are governed by partisan factors similar to those of gubernatorial elections, with partisan and hybrid elections having stronger correlations than nonpartisan elections. Chapter 7 extends the analysis to retention elections. Consistent with previous research, Kritzer finds that retention elections are subject to partisan forces, though to a lesser degree than partisan and hybrid elections. This is one more nail in the coffin of the argument that retention elections focus on the merits of the candidate and not on political factors.
Finally, in Chapter 8, Kritzer recaps his major findings, with the bottom line being that changes that have occurred in state supreme court elections have mirrored changes in American elections more generally. Additionally, he discusses two methods of judicial selection (the career model and appointments commission model) that are used in other countries and argues how they would work if a state were to adopt them. He is realistic about the low likelihood of large-scale changes in judicial selection given Americans’ love of elections. However, there are four minor modifications that could improve the quality of judges: Professionalize and enhance the judicial screening process, make use of more part-time judgeships to evaluate potential candidates, further constrain the appointing authority, and make use of judicial performance evaluations. Kritzer is careful to consider the positives and negatives of any potential reform (particularly relevant in the case of judicial performance evaluations).
It will come as no surprise to those who know the author’s work that the book is meticulously sourced and documented, with detailed discussion of coding and more than 20 pages of references. Indeed, the bibliography itself is valuable to scholars interested in the area of judicial selection. Moreover, Chapter 2 provides a detailed overview of the myriad variations in the institutional rules and structures of state supreme courts.
If I have a quibble about Justices on the Ballot, it would be that its account is undertheorized in places. Kritzer is far more persuasive at documenting the changes that have occurred than at explaining the reasons why they have occurred. Some of the explanations for changes, especially in Chapters 6 and 7, are a bit too case specific for me. This is not meant as a damning criticism. Far from it. The data and analysis he presents are compelling on their own merits, and scholars will be able to build off of them in order to test hypotheses about the causes of these trends. In this way, this work is foundational to the field.
In sum, this book is an exemplary piece of social science. Kritzer identifies an interesting puzzle and doggedly tracks down the data necessary to try and solve it. It will become one of the “go to” sources for scholars of judicial selection.
