Does Judicial Campaign Finance Skew The Courts Rightwards?

(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)

So argues a new study by Michael Kang and Joanna Shepard, briefly blogged about here. The key bit:

In a new paper still in progress, The Partisan Foundations of Judicial Campaign Finance, we identify broad left- and right-leaning political coalitions, allied with the Democratic and Republican Parties, whose collective contributions exercise systematic influence across the range of decisions by judges who receive their money... 

In addition, we go on to find a striking partisan asymmetry between Republicans and Democrats in judicial campaign finance. Money from conservative groups in the Republican coalition, as well as from the party itself, is associated with more conservative judicial decisionmaking by Republican judges, even controlling for individual ideology. However, decisionmaking by Republican judges is not responsive to money from liberal sources. Decisionmaking by Democratic judges, by contrast, is influenced by campaign support from both liberal and conservative sources and thus cross pressured in opposite directions. The result is that judicial campaign finance reinforces party cohesion for Republicans while undermining it for Democrats. Campaign finance thus predicts judicial decisionmaking by judges from both parties in some sense, but is much more successful in serving partisan ends for Republicans, netting out in a conservative direction between the two parties.

Like any study with such obvious and direct partisan results, this should be taken with a heavy dose of salt, and I hope to delve into the draft article more deeply to see how they arrived at their results. But I thought I'd flag it for others who might be interested.