Goodbye, Montesquieu: Executive Spillovers in Judicial Elections

Nicola Fontana (), Tommaso Nannicini and James Snyder ()
Additional contact information
Nicola Fontana: Department of Economics, Trinity College Dublin
James Snyder: Department of Government, Harvard University

No tep0626, Economic Papers from Trinity College Dublin, Economics Department

Abstract: We study whether the partisan affiliation of U.S. state governors affects the outcome of partisan judicial elections. Exploiting close gubernatorial races from 1946 to 2023, we find that electing a Democratic (Republican) governor significantly increases the subsequent vote share of Democratic (Republican) judicial candidates. This executive spillover effect arises despite the formal institutional independence of the judiciary and holds in contexts with similar levels of polarization and partisanship. Our findings show that, under partisan judicial elections, even narrow shifts in executive power can erode the separation of powers, as some voters adjust their judicial choices in response to the partisan control of the executive. This effect is stronger when executive and legislative powers are unified and when the judicial election occurs soon after the governor's race.

Keywords: Judicial Elections; Partisan Alignment; Regression Discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 K40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2026-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-law and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.tcd.ie/Economics/TEP/2026/TEP0626.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tcd:tcduee:tep0626

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic Papers from Trinity College Dublin, Economics Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Colette Angelov ().