Retention Mechanisms, Salience, and Neoinstitutional Voting: Murder, Torts, and Property Crime.

Strategic modeling of court decisions at all levels is an important piece of understanding judicial behavior. A next step in the strategic literature involves systematicaly testing for different types of cases. Also important is the idea that justices in competitive electoral retention systems and elite reappointment systems may act strategically in certain types of cases. For instance, it is plausible that a governor may not retain an appointed justice that votes for extremely large civil suit payouts while voters in retention elections may not care much about this issue. Therefore, different types of cases may have more salience to certain retention systems.My theory posits that cases with relatively low salience, such as property crimes, will not compel strategic behavior by justices on a state supreme court, regardless of the preferences of other actors. On other issues, such as murder, and torts cases, the adoption of policy positions that diverge from the preferences of decision makers in the selection process may reduce the likelihood of a state supreme court justice remaining on a court. For this analysis, I examine murder, property crime, and torts cases, looking at criminal v. civil and low v. high salience.To test the theory, I use the Hall and Brace judge level dataset from 1995-1998 to find justice votes in each category from 1995-1998. I code for additional variables at the state level such as judicial ideology, state level ideology, etc, and use a logit model with the justice vote as the dependent variable. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]