Bidding for Justice: The Influence of Contributions on State Supreme Courts.

While there are many studies that examine the impact of campaign contributions on the judiciary most of these focus on the impact on case outcomes. We posit a relationship between the campaign contribution to an individual justice and the vote of that individual justice. To determine the relationship between campaign contributions and the votes of state supreme court justices we employ the data from the National Institute for Money in Politics on the donations to Wisconsin Supreme Court justices and the cases they decided post-contribution. With one notable exception, we find no significant relationship between contributions and votes of the justices of Wisconsin Supreme Court. Our findings create a future research agenda to examine the impact of contributions on individual justices of other state supreme courts to determine if there are similar findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]