Political Trust and Judicial Retention Elections

Retention elections are that part of the merit selection plan designed to hold judges accountable to the public. While more than one scholar has concluded that votes cast in a retention election are often not informed evaluations of the judge's qualifications and/or conduct on the bench, the few existing systematic empirical studies have failed to explain why people vote for or against retention. This study fills part of this void by testing the hypothesis that political trust is a major cue in judicial retention voting. In contrast to most previous work which was either limited to the appellate level or to elections in a single state, the data set consists of 1,864 retention elections held from 1964 through 1984 for major trial court judges. The national trends in political trust in the last two decades are found to be reflected in the trends in the mean vote for retention.