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Bonneau's Argument Analysis

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Bonneau found that state supreme court campaign spending was driven by the characteristics of race, institutional arrangements, and the electoral and state supreme court context. There were moments when he defended his position well, but then moments when he did not. A few of his hypotheses were disproved, either as having intervening factors or spurious.

The main strength in Bonneau’s argument was that he gave many comparisons and contrasts of the state judicial systems. They are similar in the fact that they need money in order to campaign and they need to campaign in order to get electoral support. They are different because judges are not expected to represent the interests of their constituents when compared to legislators. They are prohibited from campaigning on issues that may come before the court. State supreme court elections occur under a variety of institutional arrangements.

The main weakness in Bonneau’s argument was his estimation technique. He used data from all 281 partisan and nonpartisan elections from 1990 to 2000. He used a dataset on 1980-1995 state supreme court elections and supplemented them through 2000. Regardless of his hypotheses, he found that a race for the state high court bench was more expensive if it was for an open seat, if the competition for it was closer, if there were fewer high court seats on the ballot, if …show more content…

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