Judicial Elections and Their Implications in North Carolina

This paper explores the impact that systems of judicial elections have on judges’ decision making. I argue that elections force judicial candidates to depend on private campaign contributions in order to be elected, and that lawyers and law firms who frequently appear in court have the greatest incentive to contribute to judicial campaigns. Therefore, I contend that judicial elections create a system where campaign contributions could generate biases in judges’ behavior in favor of the parties that contributed to their campaigns. I expect that there will be a significant and positive relationship between lawyers’ campaign contributions and judges’ decisions in the years following their elections. To test this theory, I compiled a dataset that compares the campaign contributors of the four North Carolina Supreme Court judges who were elected in 2006 with the lawyers and firms that argued cases before them in 2007 and 2008. I then conducted an empirical analysis of the impact of contributions on judicial decisions. The results of this analysis suggest that there is a significant and positive relationship between lawyers’ campaign contributions and judges’ decision making. I also analyzed the relationship between contributions and decisions in the context of the state’s public financing program, where judicial candidates could receive a portion of their campaign funds from the state. The results suggest that participating in the public financing program did not eliminate the influence of private contributions on judges’ votes.Bachelor of Art