Abstract
Should technocratic public officials be selected through politics or by merit? This paper explores how selection procedures influence the quality of selected officials in the context of U.S. state supreme courts for the years 1947–1994. In a unique set of natural experiments, state governments enacted a variety of reforms making judicial elections less partisan and establishing merit-based procedures that delegate selection to experts. We compare post-reform judges to pre-reform judges in their work quality, measured by forward citations to their opinions. In this setting we can hold constant contemporaneous incentives and the portfolio of cases, allowing us to produce causal estimates under an identification assumption of parallel trends in quality by judge starting year. We find that judges selected by nonpartisan processes (nonpartisan elections or technocratic merit commissions) produce higher-quality work than judges selected by partisan elections. These results are consistent with a representative voter model in which better technocrats are selected when the process has less partisan bias or better information regarding candidate ability.
Highlights
Our daily lives are shaped by the decisions of public officials, in particular those who make decisions in our courts (Djankov et al, 2003)
State supreme court judges are some of the most powerful officials in state government, with the authority to review not just the decisions of lower courts and the laws produced by state legislatures
We show that there is no evidence of selective attrition among control judges according to prereform work quality (Appendix Table A.1)
Summary
Our daily lives are shaped by the decisions of public officials, in particular those who make decisions in our courts (Djankov et al, 2003). State supreme court judges are some of the most powerful officials in state government, with the authority to review not just the decisions of lower courts and the laws produced by state legislatures. These judges are the last appeal on important features of common law, including most rules on contract, property, employment, tort, and crimes. Their decisions serve as binding precedent for all courts in the state. Previous Experience Private Practice Judiciary Politics Academia Career Length How Ended Retired Died in Office
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