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90 Judicature 208 (2006-2007)
Judicial Retention Election Trends 1964-2006

handle is hein.journals/judica90 and id is 208 raw text is: he Judicial Retention Project database1 now con- spiked upward 10 points for a single election cycle.' This tains results from 1964, when several states first momentary surge in trust did not benefit judges; the affir- adopted the merit-retention system, to 2006. mative vote remained constant in the 2000, 2002, and 2004 Through the years the proj- elections. ect has published several Updating and expanding information In addition to the yearly detailed analyses of reten- previously reported in Trends in variation, the affirmative tion election issues and then vote continues to vary from summarized and updated judicial retention elections, 1964-1998, state to state and from dis- some of the findings in a Judicature, September-October 1999. trict to district within states. series of reports.' This article This variation is yet to be provides a further update and reports developments on four elements of widespread interest: the affirmative vote, defeated judges, voter differ- entiation, and rolloff. Affirmative vote Both Figure 1 and Table 1 report the variability in the national mean affirmative vote across time. The national average dropped 9 points from 1968 to 1974 whereupon it remained relatively stable, if not drifting slightly upward, until 1990. Then the affirmative vote suffered a 7-point drop in a single election cycle, declining from 76.7 percent in 1988 to 69.4 percent in 1990. The average climbed back to the 75 percent level where it remained almost constant from 1998 to 2004 before decreasing slightly in 2006. As seen in Figure 1, the affirmative vote is strongly related to political trust. The correlation coefficient between the trust index and affirmative vote is .82 for the years 1964 through 2004.2 The trust index is more sensitive to trust in national institutions/officials than to trust in state and local officials and this may explain an interesting disconnect evident in Figure 1. By the 2000 election both the trust index and the affirmative vote had returned to their mid-1980s highs. Then, after 9/11, the trust index completely explained and the inter-state differences are reported in Table 1. While the Missouri and Wyoming affirmative vote means are about 10 points apart in 2006, respectively 68.8 percent 1. The 6,306 retention elections in the data set are all major trial court, appellate court, and supreme court retention elections held in the states of Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Wyoming from 1964 through 2006. These 10 states use pure retention elections for the major trial court and all higher courts, hold the elections at the even-numbered years' fall general elections (i.e., 1976, 1978, 1980, etc.), and began using retention elections at least by 1976 Eight other states also employ retention elections; however, they either began to do so after 1976 and/or do not use them for trial courts. Thus, their elections are not included here so as to maximize comparability across time. 2. For the earlier summaries see William Hall and Larry Aspin, What twenty years of judicial retention elections have told us, 70 JUDIcATuRE 340 (1987); Larry Aspin, William Hall, Jean Bax and Celeste Montoya, Thirty years of judicial retention elections: an update, 37 Soc. Sci. . (2000); and Larry Aspin, Trends in judicial retentions elections, 1964-1998, 83JUDIcATURE 79 (1999). 3. The trust index cannot be calculated for 2006. The 2006 American National Election Study included only one of the four questions used to con- struct the trust index. 4. It has been suggested by many researchers, and empirically supported by others (e.g., See Gary Langer, Trust in government... to do what? 13 PUBLIC PERSPECTIVE 7 (July/August 2002) that this upward spike in trust was due to confidence in national officials to handle issues related to national security and terrorism, not confidence in national officials to handle social issues, which remained low, Also, state and local government did not also enjoy an upward spike in trust in 2002, but rather remained constant (See Richard Cole and John Kincaid, Public opinion on U.S. federal and intergovernmental issues in 2006: continuity and change, 36 PUBLIUS 443 (2006). Thus, it is very possible that trust in the judiciary did not also experience an upward spike after 9/ 11. 208 JUDICATURE Volume 90, Number 5 March-April 2007

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