Reducing partisanship in judicial elections can improve judge quality: Evidence from U.S. state supreme courts
نویسندگان
چکیده
Should technocratic public officials be selected through politics or by merit? This paper explores how selection procedures influence the quality of in context U.S. state supreme courts for years 1947–1994. In a unique set natural experiments, governments enacted variety reforms making judicial elections less partisan and establishing merit-based that delegate to experts. We compare post-reform judges pre-reform their work quality, measured forward citations opinions. this setting we can hold constant contemporaneous incentives portfolio cases, allowing us produce causal estimates under an identification assumption parallel trends judge starting year. find nonpartisan processes (nonpartisan merit commissions) higher-quality than elections. These results are consistent with representative voter model which better technocrats when process has bias information regarding candidate ability.
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ژورنال
عنوان ژورنال: Journal of Public Economics
سال: 2021
ISSN: ['0047-2727', '1879-2316']
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2021.104478