Examining the Dynamics Between Criminal Justice Campaign Messaging, News Coverage, Public Policy Mood, and Voter Participation in Judicial Elections

ABSTRACT Objective In low‐information elections, any amount of information can be decisive in voter behavior, including the choice of whether to make a choice in each race. In judicial elections, often low‐information affairs, rhetoric about criminal justice typically attracts the most attention of potential voters. Given the nature of these judicial races, voter knowledge on candidates relies on a variety of state‐ and race‐level contextual factors, including issues of law and order, a key feature of judicial races as highlighted in campaign advertising. We examine the impact of crime rhetoric in judicial campaign ads, front‐page news coverage of criminal cases, and public policy mood on ballot roll‐off. Argument This paper argues that the ubiquity of crime‐related references in judicial advertising leads to the electorate having more information to use at the ballot box. In addition, it also argues that front‐page news coverage of criminal cases also mobilizes voter participation in judicial elections. These increased information avenues lead to higher levels of voter participation in judicial races. Furthermore, conservative constituencies are primed to respond more strongly to crime advertising. Methods The unit of analysis of the dataset in our study is on the ad‐candidate level. As the dependent variable for average ballot roll‐off in an election and ballot roll‐off per race are continuous and our dataset is hierarchical in nature, we estimated our analyses using linear mixed‐effects models with state and year random effects. The time frame of our study is 2000 to 2018. We examine three main independent variables: crime rhetoric in judicial campaign ads, front‐page news coverage of criminal cases, and public policy mood. Results We find that while crime messaging in judicial campaign ads do little to mobilize voters, front‐page news coverage of criminal cases and states that have more liberal (i.e., prefer more government engagement in policy areas)‐not conservative‐public policy moods motivate voter participation in judicial elections. As judicial campaigns pour significant resources to air ads centering on crime and punishment to mobilize voters, our findings suggest crime messaging does not shape voter participation in these races as much as other state‐level contextual factors.