When Money Cannot Encourage Participation: Campaign Spending and Rolloff in Low Visibility Judicial Elections.

Debates about the role of money in politics are commonplace. Although some critics point to the potentially negative impact spending has in elections, most recent scholarly evidence indicates that spending may actually promote greater participation in the political process. However, most of this research has uncovered this relationship in races for more visible offices; few studies have focused on whether the same linkage is present in low-information elections. For a variety of reasons, it is not altogether certain whether this relationship would exist for such offices. To test this proposition, we examine the impact of campaign spending on voter rolloff in 172 contested races for intermediate appellate courts (IAC) between 2000 and 2008. In contrast to other types of elections, combined candidate spending in these races had no effect on ballot rolloff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]