The Friends and Neighbors Effect in Judicial Retention Elections

Abstract

HIS is a study of judicial retention elections for major trial court judges. Judicial retention elections differ from the more traditional partisan or nonpartisan elections in several respects. The absence of traditional voting cues including party labels, candidate appeals, incumbency, campaigns, and relatively fewer issues makes these plebiscites a most interesting topic for examination. One of the few traditional voting cues present in judicial retention elections is the cue of and neighbors, which has received little scholarly attention (Key 1949; Dubois 1979; Griffin and Horan 1982). This article will rectify this oversight by empirically examining the and effect in judicial retention elections. It is said that all politics are local politics. We found it surprising therefore, that one of the voting cues which has received very little attention is and neighbors. Voting on the basis of friends and neighbors is a Babbit-like calculated promotion of local interest. The candidate garners support (votes) not primarily for what he stands for or because of his capacities, but because of where he lives (Key 1949: 37). Studying the oneparty politics of the South, where many of the traditional voting cues were absent, Key called that appeal back the home-town boy irrelevant, but he was careful to point out that in the absence of traditional voting cues, such an appeal based on boosterism can exert no little influence over an electorate (Key 1949: 41). Trial court personnel were chosen as the subjects of this study because 90 percent of all court business of this nation takes place in the state trial courts. A very small percentage of cases are appealed and reviewed by higher courts.