Posted by The Situationist Staff on September 26, 2010
Michael S. Kang and Joanna Shepherd recently posted the important paper “The Partisan Price of Justice: An Empirical Analysis of Campaign Contributions and Judicial Decisions” on SSRN. Here’s the abstract.
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Do campaign contributions affect judicial decisions by elected judges in favor of their contributors’ interests? Although the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. relies on this intuition for its logic, it has been until now largely a proposition that has gone empirically untested. No longer. Using a dataset of every state supreme court case in all fifty states over a four-year period, we find that elected judges are more likely to decide in favor of business interests as the amount of campaign contributions that they have received from those interests increases. In other words, every dollar of direct contributions from business groups is associated with an increase in the probability that the judges will vote for business litigants. However, we find surprisingly a statistically significant relationship between campaign contributions and judicial decisions in favor of contributors’ interests only for judges elected in partisan elections, not nonpartisan ones. Our findings suggest an important role of political parties in connecting campaign contributions to judicial decisions under partisan elections. In the flurry of reform activity responding to Caperton, our findings support judicial reforms that propose the replacement of partisan elections with nonpartisan methods of judicial selection and retention.
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You can download the paper for free here. For a sample of related Situationist posts, see “Situationist Corruption,” “The Situation of Judges,” “The Situation of Earmarks,” “The Situation of Judging – Part I,” and “The Situation of Judging – Part II.”
Posted in Abstracts, Deep Capture, Distribution, Law, Politics | Tagged: campaign contributions, Capture, Judicial Elections | 1 Comment »
Posted by The Situationist Staff on September 14, 2010
Molly J. Walker Wilson recently posted her article, “Behavioral Decision Theory and Implications for the Supreme Court’s Campaign Finance Jurisprudence” (Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 31, p. 679, 2010) on SSRN. Here’s the abstract.
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America stands at a moment in history when advances in the understanding of human decision-making are increasing the strategic efficacy of political strategy. As campaign spending for the presidential race reaches hundreds of millions of dollars, the potential for harnessing the power of psychological tactics becomes considerable. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has characterized campaign money as “speech” and has required evidence of corruption or the appearance of corruption in order to uphold restrictions on campaign expenditures. Ultimately, the Court has rejected virtually all restrictions on campaign spending on the ground that expenditures, unlike contributions, do not contribute to corruption or the appearance of corruption. However, behavioral decision research and theory provide strong support for the notion that expenditures do corrupt the political process, because there is a nexus between campaign spending, strategic manipulation, and sub-optimal voting decisions. This Article applies behavioral research and theory to advance a new definition of “corruption,” arguing that there is a vital governmental interest in regulating campaign expenditures in order to limit manipulative campaign tactics and to reduce the existing inequities in access to channels of communication and persuasion.
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You can download the entire article for free here. For a sample of related Situationist posts, see “The Situation of Corruption,” “Larry Lessig’s Situationism,” “The Situation of Swift-Boating,” “Deep Capture – Part VII,” “The Situation of Earmarks,” “The Deeply Captured Situation of the Economic Crisis,” and “Our Stake in Corporate Behavior.”
Posted in Abstracts, Behavioral Economics, Deep Capture, Law, Politics | Tagged: campaign contributions, Citizens United, corruption | Leave a Comment »