Rock, Emily, and Lawrence Baum. “The Impact of High-Visibility Contests for U.S. State Court Judgeships: Partisan Voting in Nonpartisan Elections,” 10 State Politics and Policy Quarterly 368 (2010).

This empirical study examines a series of post-election surveys of voters in fourteen contests for the Ohio Supreme Court over twenty years, concluding that in a state in which candidates’ party affiliations are not disclosed on the ballot, high-visibility contests for judgeships produce more partisan voting than do lower-visibility contests, suggesting that high-visibility elections result in greater voter awareness of basic candidate information and that this information informs voting decisions.