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The Significance of Voting Cues in State Supreme Court Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Philip L. Dubois
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Abstract

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Voters rarely take time to inform themselves about the candidates and issues in judicial elections. Uninformed, voters must rely upon some kind of voting cue, such as political party affiliation, incumbency, name familiarity, or the like, to help them cast their ballots in these low-salience elections. This article examines the effects these cues have in determining voter behavior in partisan and nonpartisan elections for state supreme court justices. The results show that party labels structure voter behavior along partisan lines. Without a party cue, however, voting decisions are relatively unstructured and, as examples show, often produce idiosyncratic results. The implications of these findings for the continuing debate over judicial selection are then explored.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , Spring 1979 , pp. 757 - 779
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Professors David Adamany and Alexander J. Groth and Ms. Lisa Lewis Dubois for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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