by Patrick Appel
A reader writes:
One great example of Matt Glassman's point about party labels as a necessary shortcut is judicial elections. Absolutely no one pays attention to these. I'm a law student at a top-10 school, and in a seminar I'm taking on judicial decision making the vast majority of the class, including myself and the professor, were not sure even whether we had ever voted in a judicial election. If that group of people does not pay attention to judicial elections then really, no one does.
The only time the public hears about judicial elections is when an interest group attempts to unseat a judge. Prominent examples include California removing Rose Bird and two other Supreme Court justices over opposition to the death penalty and, more recently, Iowa removing justices for requiring marriage equality. Such campaigns often disingenuously capitalize on issues likely to spark outrage: in West Virginia, Justice Warren McGraw was removed from the bench when business interests, unhappy with his treatment of corporate defendants, funded an ad campaign focusing on a single vote by Justice McGraw in a case involving child molestation (see here at page 5). One newspaper ad targeted a California municipal judge for never imposing a prison sentence, when municipal judges in fact do not have the authority to impose prison time (see here at page 6).
States that hold judicial elections vary in whether party labels appear on the ballot. One study found that nonpartisan judicial elections actually leave judges more vulnerable to this sort of interest group attack, because voters' only information is the attack, and not the party label cue that might reflect a broader alignment of values than isolated decisions misleadingly portrayed in an ad campaign. Ironically, nonpartisan elections were intended as a reform to increase judicial independence and reduce political influence over decision making.
Another reader differs:
Matt Glassman’s analysis rests on a huge causal assumption that I think is difficult to defend. He believes that “no one has yet devised a better system of signals that allow low-information voters to make election choices that reflect their political beliefs and interest priorities.” I think you could reverse the causation here and argue that people are low information voters precisely because they make voting decisions in a tribal manner, rather than on an analysis of proposed policies or even their own self-interest. The fact that partisanship serves a social-identity function discourages carefully thinking or information seeking. Once I’ve decided I am going to vote republican (or democratic), there really isn’t any rational reason to become a high-information voter.
I would remind Matt, that most people’s party membership is extremely well predicted by social factors (i.e., the party affiliation of their peers and neighbors) and is NOT well predicted by objective measures of self-interests.
The Dish 