Testing Williams-Yulee: A Survey Experiment on Judicial Elections, Institutional Trust, and Tenuous Empirical Claims in the Supreme Court

Abstract

In Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar (2015), the supreme court ruled that a Florida law banning direct campaign solicitation by judicial candidates was not a violation of the First Amendment. In doing so, the majority relied on a number of untested empirical claims, including the proposition that direct solicitation has a distinctly stronger impact on the public’s confidence in the judiciary than indirect solicitation. This paper tests these empirical claims using a nationally representative survey experiment that presents subjects with a hypothetical vignette in which a state trial-level judge runs for election and utilizes one of a number of campaign fundraising tactics. The survey then present subjects with questions relating to the trust and legitimacy that they associate with both the judicial system presented in the vignette and their actual state- and federal-level government institutions. I find that the public does not discern any significant difference between direct and indirect judicial solicitation but does see other campaign features (promises of recusal and the amount of the donations) as salient in regard to trust and legitimacy. These findings are at odds with the empirical assumptions that the majority relied upon in the Williams-Yulee decision.