Judicial decisionmaking scholars comparing outcomes from "elected" and "non-elected" judges invariably turn to state court systems (if the analytic focus is domestic) for the necessary variation. Those turning to the array of state court systems--and the range of state supreme court election types--invariably confront data gathering challenges that materially differ from challenges associated with, e.g., Art. III judges. One of the leading state court scholars, Bert Kritzer (Minn.), continues to make state court election data gathering efforts a bit easier for the rest of us. Not only has Bert engaged in the often under-appreciated yet Herculean effort of original data set building, but he shares his data sets (and associated documentation, codebooks, etc.) with other interested scholars. Bert's most recent updating effort, curated on Harvard's Dataverse, includes a collection of state supreme court election results that now range from 1946 through 2020.
"The archive includes three core datasets plus state-level Excel spreadsheets for all states that employed elections at least part of the time since 1946 to select or retain members of the state supreme court (known New York state as the Court of Appeals) including for Texas and Oklahoma both the state supreme court and the Court of Criminal Appeals which are the final courts for criminal cases in those states."
Those interested in the data sets can click here.
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