Recent trends in judicial elections, including expensive rough-and-tumble campaigns characterized by televised attack advertising and politicized discourse, are causing advocacy groups and legal scholars to condemn the practice of electing judges. This paper addresses an important aspect of this...

Anecdotal evidence often points to aging as a cause for reduced work performance. This paper provides empirical evidence on this issue in a context where performance is measurable and there is variation in mandatory retirement policies: U.S. state supreme courts. We find that introducing...

Using data on state supreme court judges for the years 1947 through 1994, we find that judges selected by nonpartisan elections and judges selected by technocratic merit commissions produce higher-quality work than judges selected by partisan elections. Election-year pressure reduces work...

Several scholars suggest that the amount of public reasoning expected from officials varies across institutions and is determined by the democratic connection of the institution. This paper evaluates this logic as a potential explanation for variation in the amount of public reasoning by state...

Anecdotal evidence often points to aging as a cause for reduced work performance. This paper provides empirical evidence on this issue in a context where performance is measurable and there is variation in mandatory retirement policies: U.S. state supreme courts. We find that introducing...

The judicialization of politics, or alternatively, politization of the judiciary has been much discussed over the last twenty years. Despite this, the way judges influence fiscal policy outcomes remains, to a large extent, unexplored. This paper attempts, at least partially, to fill this...

This paper assesses the extent to which elected power holders informally intervene in the judiciaries of new democracies, an acknowledged but under-researched topic in studies of judicial politics. The paper first develops an empirical strategy for the study of informal interference based on...

The abstract nature of Constitutional principles, such as the social state principle, requires further interpretation to determine their concrete substance. Their realization is primarily the duty of politics and the legislator. Yet the Constitutional Courts can substantially contribute to...