Melinda Gann Hall

TL;DR: This paper analyzed the electoral fortunes of incumbents on the US supreme court from 1980 through 1995 in the 38 states using elections to staff the bench and found that partisan elections fail to evidence accountability, while nonpartisan and retention elections promote independence.

TL;DR: This article developed a contextually based, party-adjusted surrogate judge ideology measure (PAJID) and subject this measure to an extensive array of validity tests, and showed that PAJID offers a valid, stable measure of judge preferences in state supreme courts that is demonstrably superior to party affiliation in analyses of judicial decision-making.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of several types of electoral forces on death penalty votes from 1983 through 1988 in four southern state supreme courts were studied and it was shown that constituency influence in state supreme court justices is enhanced by competitive electoral conditions and experience with electoral politics.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore linkages between electoral politics and judicial voting behavior in the context of models that take into account personal, contextual, institutional, and case-related influences on courts.

TL;DR: Gates et al. as discussed by the authors applied concepts derived from neo-institutionalism to coalition behavior in state supreme courts, using a pooled cross-sectional time series design, and found that the amount of variation in dissent rates uniquely accounted for by the Neo-Institutional model is over six times that of the environmental model, while a composite model can explain more than one-third of the variation in state Supreme Court dissent rates for 1966, 1973, and 1981.