Institutional Structures and Judicial Legitimacy

Despite high-profile arguments about the negative consequences of judicial elections for judicial legitimacy, empirical evidence is ambiguous, at best. Drawing on more than 28,000 survey responses, representative at the state level, we find no evidence that elected courts are less legitimate than appointed courts. To further explore this finding, we draw upon a survey of Wisconsin, a state that has experienced a large amount of politicized judicial campaigning. We demonstrate that citizens expect this type of activity in their elections, even though they say they dislike it. Then, we present new evidence on the causal effects of campaign activity on attitudes toward courts in this state. We demonstrate that, though citizens may believe that courts selected through expensive and negative elections are less fair, there is no evidence that they find elected courts to be less legitimate or worthy of compliance.