Political Risk and Strategic Investing : Explaining Political Parties and Interest Groups' Contributions in State Supreme Court Elections

The purpose of this paper is to analyze under what conditions political parties and interest groups are more likely to participate in state supreme court elections. This paper focuses on the amount of money that each group contributed to judicial candidates in partisan and non-partisan elections from 2000 to 2008. Political parties, single issue groups, attorneys, business groups, and labor groups were included to determine whether there were systematic variations in contributions between the types of groups. The results indicate that two factors were important in explaining groups’ contributions to judicial campaigns: the type of judicial election and the competitiveness of the race. Thus, there appeared to be systematic differences in the type of strategic calculations that different groups used to determine when to contribute money to judicial campaigns. Political parties and economic interest groups appeared to use strategic calculations whereas single issue groups were more willing to take political risks in contributing money to judicial campaigns