Penny for Your Thoughts? Campaign Spending in California Trial Court Elections, 1976-1982

Abstract

S INCE Alexander Heard (1960) published his seminal work on political finance, scholars have been interested in understanding more about the role of money in election campaigns. As with other kinds of electoral research, attention focused initially upon the costs of presidential campaigns (Alexander 1962, 1966, 1971), followed thereafter by analyses of spending in U.S. senatorial and congressional elections and state gubernatorial and legislative elections (Adamany 1969, 1972; Owens 1973). To date, however, there has been almost no research on the amounts of money spent by candidates seeking elective judicial positions (see Berg 1980; Slead 1981; Schotland 1985). Although there is now a fairly substantial body of literature on various other aspects of judicial elections (see Volcansek 1982), very little systematic evidence has been collected on how much judicial candidates spend and even less is known about what factors influence those spending levels.1 Although knowing how much and why campaigns cost what they do has been important for understanding the role of money in elections generally, this knowledge is especially critical for an assessment of the role of money in judicial elections. In the first place, in states where recent judicial campaigns have been hotly contested, such as California, it is widely believed that judicial campaign costs have become prohibitively high for most candidates and growing higher with each year. Such reports naturally limit electoral competition by discouraging prospective candidates even if campaign finance levels have not in fact escalated sharply. As Adamany (1972) has noted, campaign fundraising for many candidates becomes a barrier to office expectations are pegged to the highest expenditures in previous campaigns and because the information about such expenditures is elusive and often inflated (p. 34). Another aspect of the role of money that has drawn recent attention has been the reported heavy reliance upon lawyers for the contributions required to finance judicial campaigns. This reliance troubles many observers who foresee the potential for a real or perceived conflict of interest (see Schotland 1985: 61-65, 90-96). As one California judge put it, What would you think if you were a litigant in my court and you knew the op-