Partisan Labels and Democratic Accountability: An Analysis of State Supreme Court Abortion Decisions

Abstract

Various literatures indicate that partisan labels increase the accountability of elected officials. Correspondingly, advocates of nonpartisan elections claim that this procedure helps liberate officials from political influence. These arguments have been prominent in recent debates regarding the selection of judges in U.S. state courts. We suggest, conversely, that on salient issues nonpartisan elections encourage popular judicial decisions, particularly given recent developments in judicial campaigns. To test this hypothesis, we assemble a dataset that revolves around state supreme courts’ decisions on abortion cases between 1980 and 2006. The analysis—which controls for a variety of factors and uses gubernatorial decisions as a comparative tool—provides strong support for the hypothesis.