“The Price of Uncontested Prosecutor Elections: An Empirical Perspective”

The title of this post is the title of this new paper authored by Michael Heise and available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

Most scholarship on local prosecutor elections largely ignores the influence of campaign contributions.  This is so despite an ever-increasing amount of campaign contributions that distribute unevenly across local prosecutor candidates and their mostly uncontested elections.  Motivating this study includes a desire to develop an initial accounting of factors, including campaign contributions, which plausibly inform the emergence of unopposed prosecutor candidates and uncontested elections.  Leveraging the leading and recently-released prosecutor election and campaign contributions data sets for the most recent prosecutor elections across the United States between 2012-2019, findings from this study identify a robust set of core factors that systematically distinguish unopposed candidates as well as their uncontested elections.  These factors include campaign contributions, district population, prosecutors’ political affiliation, and incumbency.  Overall, these results do not uncover any obvious policy levers that might help reduce the number of uncontested prosecutor candidates and elections.