Reducing partisanship in judicial elections can improve judge quality: Evidence from U.S. state supreme courts
中文摘要
技术官僚型公职人员应通过政治过程还是择优方式选拔？本文以1947—1994年美国州最高法院为背景，探讨选拔程序如何影响被选拔官员的质量。在一组独特的自然实验中，州政府实施了多种改革，使司法选举的党派性降低，并确立了将选拔权授予专家的择优程序。我们比较改革后法官与改革前法官的工作质量，以对其判决意见的前向引用量来衡量。在这一情境中，我们可以保持同期激励和案件组合不变，从而在法官任职起始年份上质量满足平行趋势这一识别假设下，得到因果估计。我们发现，经由非党派程序（非党派选举或技术官僚型择优委员会）选拔的法官，其工作质量高于经由党派选举选拔的法官。这些结果与一个代表性选民模型相一致：当程序党派偏见较少，或关于候选人能力的信息更好时，会选拔出更优秀的技术官僚。
Abstract
Should technocratic public officials be selected through politics or by merit? This paper explores how selection procedures influence the quality of selected officials in the context of U.S. state supreme courts for the years 1947–1994. In a unique set of natural experiments, state governments enacted a variety of reforms making judicial elections less partisan and establishing merit-based procedures that delegate selection to experts. We compare post-reform judges to pre-reform judges in their work quality, measured by forward citations to their opinions. In this setting we can hold constant contemporaneous incentives and the portfolio of cases, allowing us to produce causal estimates under an identification assumption of parallel trends in quality by judge starting year. We find that judges selected by nonpartisan processes (nonpartisan elections or technocratic merit commissions) produce higher-quality work than judges selected by partisan elections. These results are consistent with a representative voter model in which better technocrats are selected when the process has less partisan bias or better information regarding candidate ability.