ABSTRACT
Have state supreme court elections become more competitive in recent years? That question has been an important part of the debate regarding those elections (e.g., Kang and Shepherd 2011, 2015; Shepherd and Kang 2014). Proponents of changing the role of elections in the process of selection and retention of judges, particularly judges on state supreme courts, argue that the claimed increase in competitiveness creates a range of problems for judges-dependence on campaign contributions, caution in decision making, etc.—and justifies reconsidering what role, if any, elections should play in staffing courts. However, in previous work (Kritzer 2011, 2015) I showed that while there has been some change both in the likelihood that state supreme court elections would be contested and in the competitiveness of those elections, those changes are largely limited to southern states. Moreover, the changes that occurred in those states coincided with broader political changes in the South: first the resistance to desegregation, then the end of the Democratic Party’s overwhelming dominance in the southern states, and finally the current dominance of the Republican Party in most of those states. In this chapter, I revisit the question of whether there has been an increase in contestation and competitiveness by asking whether my previous description of change was too simplistic. I do this by examining individual state patterns for all thirty-eight states that currently employ popular elections to select and/ or retain the justices of their courts of last resort, which I will refer to as “state supreme courts.”1
