 Priming ideology I: Why do presidential elections affect U.S. judgesDaniel L. Chen European Economic Review, 2024, vol. 169, issue C Abstract: Politicians’ behavioral changes as an election nears have typically been attributed to the incentive effects of an election. I document that behavioral changes can occur even for unelected judges, using data from 1925 to 2002 on U.S. appellate judges, who are appointed for life. Exploiting monthly campaign ads in judges’ states of residence, dissents increase with campaign advertisements in states where judges reside. Elections can explain 23 % of all dissents. I rule out a number of incentive-based explanations. Topic of dissents, replication in concurrences (disagreement about reasoning), and placebo checks using milestones of case development support a transient priming mechanism. If elite U.S. judges are in fact susceptible to priming via the partisan nature of electoral cycles, then highly trained individuals may be susceptible to other forms of priming regardless of their professional commitments to be unbiased. Keywords: Judicial decision making; Salience; Identity (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:169:y:2024:i:c:s0014292124001648 DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2024.104835 Access Statistics for this article European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier |
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