Into the debate on whether state judicial posts should be filled by elections or appointment comes a new study that interviewed 4,000 Pennsylvanians before, during and after the testy 2007 state Supreme Court race.

The study -- by a Washington University professor and the Annenberg School for Communication -- argues that the race, however negative, enhanced the legitimacy and authority of the Court. According to Annenberg, it's the first academic study to ever investigate the effect of elections on the legitimacy of courts.

Here's a concluding paragraph:

In the end, our findings are also intuitively pleasing: few would contend that elections are uniformly beneficial, just as few would argue that elections are exclusively harmful. Elections are a mixed bag, at least in the eyes of the citizenry. Our study recognizes both the good and the bad of elections but concludes that the net effect is to enhance judicial legitimacy.

To the extent that the American people have their way, elections for state judges are here to stay. With elections, candidates will campaign, and campaign tactics that are successful will likely be emulated. Electoral success, in turn, will not be forthcoming if candidates violate
the normative expectations of citizens. Understanding this complex mixture of expectations, perceptions, and understandings and evaluations of courts will clearly require a great deal of additional research on courts and their constituents.

The study was published in Political Research Quarterly this fall.

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