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Responsive Justice?

Retention Elections, Prosecutors, and Public Opinion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Michael J. Nelson
Michael J. Nelson*
Affiliation:
Washington University in St. Louis
*
Contact the author at mjnelson7@gmail.com.
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Abstract

Do elected judges and prosecutors change their behavior to reflect public opinion after they receive information about constituent preferences? In this article I use a unique measure of public opinion—votes on an initiative to legalize marijuana—to examine the responsiveness of prosecutors and trial court judges to a strong, issue-specific, constituency-level opinion signal. I find that, at least in recent drug cases in Colorado, both prosecutors and judges changed their sentencing behavior after receiving that signal. Prosecutors responded only to local-level opinion, while judges responded to both local and statewide opinion.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , Spring 2014 , pp. 117 - 152
Copyright
© 2014 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

I thank Sara Benesh, James Gibson, Morgan Hazelton, Rachael Hinkle, Andrew D. Martin, Keith Schnakenberg, Alicia Uribe, seminar participants at Washington University in St. Louis, Dave Klein, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful advice, as well as the Colorado judicial branch for providing me with the data and answering questions about them. A previous version of this article was presented at the 2012 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.

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