White Noise: The Unrealized Effects of Republican Party of Minnesota vs. White on Judicial Elections

Abstract

Republican Party of Minnesota v. White (2002) has caused the nation's most powerful legal-advocacy organizations to question the wisdom of electing judges without regulations to help keep judicial candidates above the political fray. Conventional wisdom states that White has heightened the politicization of judicial elections by facilitating expensive, below-the-belt exchanges that sharply attenuate the incumbency advantage and threaten the legitimacy of state courts. Our primary assumption is that if White has had the presumed effects, we should see measurable changes in key judicial election characteristics: an increased willing-ness of challengers to enter the electoral arena, decreased electoral support for incumbents, elevated costs of campaigns, and declines in voter participation. Overall, we find no statistically discernable changes in state supreme court or state intermediate appellate court elections on these dimensions, which should help allay the fears of those concerned about judicial elections while encouraging additional empirical research on the judicial selection controversy.