Title: Essays on elections
Description: This dissertation includes three essays that explore the impact the electoral process has on political elites and the decisions they make. Each essay explores elections at a different level and within a different branch of government. First, I analyze state-level judicial elections and their impact on legal outcomes. Although policymakers and scholars frequently debate the merits of differing systems of judicial selection, it is unclear whether differing forms of elections produce differing substantive legal outcomes. I use data from nearly 7000 criminal appeals between 1995 and 1998 and find that a state's form of judicial election--retention, partisan, or nonpartisan--has a strong and independent effect on the likelihood that a defendant will have his lower court conviction overturned. Specifically, I conclude that criminal convictions are most likely to be overturned in states with nonpartisan judicial elections and least likely to be overturned in states with partisan judicial elections. Second, I explore the impact that jurisprudential rules relating to redistricting have on grassroots political elites. I argue that these rules shaped the somewhat unorthodox mobilization strategy and tactics undertaken by an Asian American community-based organization in the months leading up to, and immediately following, a 1998 California legislative election. Through process-tracing, I demonstrate that the coalition's activities were motivated by a desire to make the case for an Asian-influence or majority-Asian legislative district. This analysis also contributes to the relative paucity of research on the mobilization and political behavior of Asian American voters.

Finally, I model county-level, swing state candidate appearances during the 2008 presidential campaign. Although presidential candidates are known to make appearances in swing states, the existing literature provides no answer to the question of where, within these states, candidates spend their time. I find that while the Republican candidates pursued a traditional strategy of mobilizing their base through these appearances, the Democratic ticket pursued a very different strategy, which focused less on partisanship and more on the demographic characteristics of the counties they visited. The substantially different electoral outcomes produced by this divergence in strategies have major implications for similarly-situated campaigns in future elections.