Campaign Donations, Judicial Recusal, and Disclosure: A Field Experiment.

This article reports results from a field experiment exploring how judicial behavior is affected by complaints about conflicts of interest. The conflicts of interest studied here arise in Wisconsin civil trial cases. Using public records, we identify instances in which one party's attorney contributed to the presiding judge's previous election campaign. We send a random subset of these judges a letter identifying the potential conflict and requesting recusal. We find that highlighting the potential conflict and asking judges to recuse sharply increases the rate at which judges disclose this relationship in court records but does not lead them to recuse. Furthermore, treated judges are no more likely to disclose or recuse in subsequent cases that present a similar conflict of interest. This experiment, which is the first to test possible remedies to judicial conflicts of interest, suggests that light touch interventions are insufficient to change judges' behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]