To what extent are local races in the United States increasingly driven by politics at the national level? Jamie Carson, Damon Cann, Jeffrey Yates, And Ronald Wright examine the nationalization of elections for the main legal actors on the front line of criminal courts – local prosecutors. They note that outgoing prosecutor candidates from the same party as the Presidential candidates who won in their district have a 20 percent greater chance of winning.
In recent decades, elections in the United States have become increasingly nationalized. While electoral politics focused for much of the 20th century primarily on local factors, it is more common today for voters to view events through the prism of national politics. This trend toward increasing nationalization is not limited to elections for the U.S. House and Senate, however. Indeed, this increase in nationalization began to affect national and local races equally.
A striking example of this trend is the race for top field lawyers in the state’s executive branches, namely local prosecutors. In the United States, prosecutors wield extraordinary power within the criminal justice system – the United States is the only country where local prosecutors are elected. As issues such as sentencing, racial disparities in incarceration, and violent crime gain more visibility, campaigns for local prosecutors have attracted increased attention due to their significant influence in the justice system criminal. This is particularly evident among a new wave of “progressive prosecutors” who aim to reduce the traditional reliance on widespread incarceration in favor of alternative methods of accountability and prevention. We’ve seen this play out quite starkly in recent months, given former President Trump’s criminal trials for alleged past indiscretions and given his recent conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records in New York State.
All politics is national: even at the local level
In the context of elections, nationalization implies an amplified link between presidential elections and national and local elections. In his 2018 book, The United States is growing: how and why American political behavior is nationalized, Daniel J. Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, illustrated that nationalization is a process in which voters rely less and less on local factors such as candidate characteristics (i.e. say one’s political background or experience in elected office) to choose who to support on Election Day, and more on factors such as which party currently resides in the White House. Therefore, factors such as the mandate or individual ideology of local candidates become secondary to factors such as an individual’s partisanship or preferred choice for the presidency during periods of greater nationalization.
Whether measured in terms of the partisan outcome of an election or the correlation between partisan vote shares across contests, there is also ample evidence of nationalization in overall electoral results in various national elections and local. We believe that this trend also affects the elections of prosecutors. As local prosecutors increasingly find themselves in the national spotlight in high-profile prosecutions (e.g., election fraud) and calls for criminal justice reform (and criticism of those reforms) grow a path on national media platforms, it is likely that the elections of prosecutors will gain importance. and mingle with national concerns. An era of strong consensus on prosecutors’ law enforcement priorities – a vision shared by both Republicans and Democrats – has given way to an era of broader voter choices and political and more vigorous ideological. Voters now face competing approaches to prosecutorial work and likely rely on their broader ideological loyalties to evaluate these choices, which are heavily influenced by the increasing nationalization of politics.
“As if they were running together…» (CC PAR 2.0) by quinn.anya
Nationalized elections and prosecutors
The prosecutor is one of the most powerful figures in the American criminal justice system for several reasons. First, legal accountability tools to ensure prosecutors act legally are weaker in the United States than in other countries. State criminal codes provide only modest constraints on prosecutorial decisions, granting them broad discretion in how they interpret and apply the law. Prosecutors have wide discretion in choosing which charges to file, with judges and other court actors unable to effectively challenge a decision not to file charges. When prosecutors choose charges, judges and juries can only evaluate the sufficiency of evidence for those specific charges during a trial. Additionally, most criminal cases in the United States are resolved through plea bargains, negotiated by the prosecutor, which avoids the need for a jury or judge to determine guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Although judges have the power to reject plea bargains, they rarely do so. Accordingly, the main check on prosecutorial power is through elections.
Our study, the first of its kind in political science, examines the electoral fortunes of incumbent prosecutors in general elections in the 200 prosecutorial districts that serve the largest populations in the United States, from 2012 to 2020. We examine two important findings in matter of attorneys general elections: if an incumbent president wins the election and if an incumbent candidate opposes him. In almost all electoral contexts, incumbents possess a well-known set of advantages for retaining their position and, in the typical case, these advantages help both to remove the likelihood of an electoral challenger and to make retention more likely. from his position if a challenger emerges.
Our models show strong support for nationalizing prosecutorial elections. Specifically, as Figure 1 shows, when the impeachment candidate shares a partisan identification with the presidential candidate who won in his or her district, the incumbent president’s probability of victory increases by almost 20 percent on average. Given the already high re-election rate of incumbents, this is a remarkably strong effect. Additionally, the likelihood that the incumbent president will face no opposition increases by almost 25 percent. While it is not impossible for an incumbent president from a different party than the local presidential candidate to achieve victory, it is much more difficult. This speaks to the influence of nationalized politics on elections, even in hyper-local positions like prosecutors.
Figure 1 – Average marginal effects on the victory of the outgoing president
Our hypothesis regarding prosecutors serving a broader population is also supported by the empirical results. Incumbents in districts with populations above the median in our sample have a probability of being unopposed that is approximately 25% lower than that of incumbents in districts with populations below the median. Additionally, the incumbent president’s probability of victory decreases by about 10 percent. The use of a partisan or non-partisan election format also has serious consequences. Although we find that election format does not have a statistically significant influence on the likelihood that incumbents run unopposed, our results show that incumbents are more likely to win in nonpartisan elections than in partisan elections; the average size of this effect in our data is eight percent.
We find little effect of prosecutor seniority on individual election outcomes, and no significant effect of years in office on the incumbent president’s victory. Seniority has only a marginal influence on the probability of not encountering opposition and its effect is basically insignificant. Finally, we find that the gender of the incumbent affects our dependent variables of interest. Specifically, we find that female incumbents are more likely to face challengers than male incumbents (an average change in predicted probability of 17% based on our observations). Female incumbents are also less likely to win, although this figure is only marginally significant, and the average effect size is smaller (about a six percent change in the probability of victory).
Any policy can be national now
Our results show that even local elections largely focused on a specific issue such as crime were affected by this increased nationalization. An incumbent prosecutor’s partisan alignment with the locally popular presidential candidate has a stronger effect on the incumbent prosecutor’s probability of victory (and the incumbent president facing a challenger) than even substantial changes in crime rates. In short, some of the most important people in local justice systems are selected largely due to political alignment with actors who have little knowledge of or interest in those local justice systems. Polarization, which undoubtedly fuels this dynamic, could usefully inform voter choice when signals from national political figures impact the issues on which elected officials will vote (e.g., members of Congress).
However, there is concern that nationalizing prosecutorial elections could result in decision-making being based on comparing a prosecutor with a national candidate on issues such as foreign policy, the environment or economic policy. , even though these questions have no real connection with current events. -daily tasks entrusted to local prosecutors. Examples of local prosecutors closely tied to nationally significant political issues in conjunction with investigations into alleged improprieties by former President Trump are just recent examples of this phenomenon. Of course, local prosecutors have found themselves at the center of national political controversies throughout our nation’s history – for example, the Tennessee Scopes Monkey Trial (teaching evolution in public schools) and the lawsuit brought by Louisiana prosecutor Jim Garrison against Clay Shaw (conspiracy to assassinate the president). Kennedy), among many others.