The Impact of High-Visibility Contests for U S State Court Judgeships Partisan Voting in Nonpartisan Elections

Over the past two decades, campaigns for judicial elections in the U S states have become larger in scale We analyze the impact of this development on voters choices between candidates Using a series of post-election surveys of voters in fourteen contests for the Ohio Supreme Court over twenty years, we probe the relationship between the amount of media coverage and campaign spending in a contest and the level of partisan voting We find that in a state in which candidates' party affiliations are not listed on the ballot, high-visibility contests for judgeships produce more partisan voting than do lower-visibility contests That effect was more pronounced for voters with greater political knowledge These findings indicate that, at least m one state setting, high-visibility judicial contests have the effect of making more voters aware of basic information about the candidates, and that information informs their voting choices