SHORT ARTICLE

Campaign Donations, Judicial Recusal, and Disclosure:

A Field Experiment
Jonathan S. Krasno, Binghamton University
Donald P. Green, Columbia University
Costas Panagopoulos, Northeastern University
Dane Thorley, Brigham Young University Law School
Michael Schwam-Baird, Grow Progress, Washington, DC

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.

A 2002 survey of 1,700 state trial court judges found

that 58% would prohibit judges from presiding over
cases in which one of the parties contributed to that
judge’s election campaign (Justice at Stake 2002). That sen-
timent has special significance because the majority of state
judges are elected and, like other candidates, raise funds for
their campaigns (American Judicature Society 2020). Because
many campaign donors are lawyers or potential litigants,
judicial fund-raising means that judges are likely at some
point to preside over cases involving donors. While a growing
literature has considered the potential effects of these relation-
ships on case outcomes (e.g., Hazelton, Montgomery, and
Nyhan 2016), and legal scholars have written on require-
ments surrounding recusal (e.g., Flamm 2017; Marbes 2017),
systematic empirical research has seldom investigated the
conditions under which judges opt to remove themselves
from cases involving donors or to disclose these financial ties
in court records.
In this essay, we present the results of a randomized field
experiment that measures judges’ willingness to step aside

Jonathan S. Krasno (jkrasno@binghamton.edu) is professor of political science, Department of Political Science, Binghamton University, PO Box 6000,
Binghamton, NY 13902. Donald P. Green (dpg2110@columbia.edu) is professor of political science, Department of Political Science, Columbia University,
420 West 118th Street, New York, NY 10027. Costas Panagopoulos (costas@post.harvard.edu) is chair and professor of political science, Department of Political
Science, Northeastern University, 1135 Tremont St., Renaissance Park 958, Boston, MA 02115. Dane Thorley (thorleyd@law.byu.edu) is associate professor of
law, Brigham Young University Law School, 341 East Campus Drive, Provo, UT 84602. Michael Schwam-Baird (michael.schwambaird@gmail.com) is lead data
scientist at Grow Progress, 1015 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20005.
This study was conducted in compliance with relevant laws and was approved by institutional review boards at Fordham University (i14-08-CP-009),
Binghamton University (373916), and Columbia University (AAAO6402). Support for this research was provided by Open Society Foundation and De-
mocracy Fund, neither of which bear any responsibility for the content of this article. Data and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the numerical
results in the article are available in the JOP Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/jop). An online appendix with supplementary material is
available at https://doi.org/10.1086/715069.

Published online July 23, 2021.

The Journal of Politics, volume 83, number 4, October 2021. q 2021 Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved. Published by The University
of Chicago Press for the Southern Political Science Association. https://doi.org/10.1086/715069 000
000 / Campaign Donations, Judicial Recusal, and Disclosure Jonathan S. Krasno et al.
from cases in which such a potential conflict of interest is
called to their attention.1 Conducted over a two-year period,
the study identified active civil cases in the Wisconsin Cir-
cuit Court in which one of the attorneys had donated to the
presiding judge’s previous campaign. A random selection of
those judges received a private letter highlighting the poten-
tial conflict of interest and asking the judge to recuse. Because
our experimental design involved the behavior of real judges
in actual civil cases, we were able to track an array of mean-
ingful outcomes beyond recusal, including disclosure of these
donations in the public case file.
Recusal over campaign donations is at the center of policy
debate and emerging case law. In Caperton v. A. T. Massey
Coal Co., 556 U.S. 868 (2009), the US Supreme Court found
that the failure of a justice of the West Virginia Supreme
Court to step aside in a case in which one of the parties had
spent $3 million to help him win election violated the due
process clause. This ruling caused several states to adopt new
recusal requirements in the face of potential conflicts related
to campaign financing. These legal thresholds range from as
low as $50 in Utah to as high as $1,500 in California, but
most states, including Wisconsin, provide no set threshold,
leaving recusal to judges’ discretion.
We find that recusal and conflict-of-interest disclosure
rarely occur in the Wisconsin Circuit Courts, the state’s trial
courts. Judges in the treatment group, who received our letter
identifying a potential conflict and urging recusal, proved to
be only marginally more likely to recuse than judges in the
control group. But while the treatment did not spur recusal, it
did have a sizable effect on disclosure, as judges in the treat-
ment group were far more likely to acknowledge the donation
in the trial record. Still, fewer than one-third of the judges in
the treatment group ultimately disclosed the conflict of in-
terest after receiving the letter. These rates fall well short of
what one would expect on the basis of surveys about recusal
and disclosure, implying limited deference to such norms by
many elected judges.
BACKGROUND, THEORY, AND EXPECTATIONS
The empirical literature on judicial campaign finance focuses
mainly on the causal relationship between campaign contri-
butions and judicial decision-making. These studies contend
that contributors achieve better outcomes than noncontrib-
utors (Cann, Bonneau, and Boyea 2012; Hazelton et al. 2016).
1. This experiment was approved by the institutional review boards at
three institutions: Columbia University, Fordham University, and Bing-
hamton University. The design and a preanalysis plan were preregistered
with Evidence in Governance and Politics. See app. D (apps. A–E available
online) for a discussion of the plan.
The American public and even judges themselves appear to
agree with these conclusions; surveys show that 71% of Amer-
icans and 46% of state judges believe campaign donations in-
fluence judicial decisions (Justice at Stake 2004; Sample et al.
2010).
Recusal as an outcome has received far less attention, even
in the wake of Massey, with much of the empirical work
simply documenting low rates of recusal. For example, Liptak
and Roberts (2006) found that judges recused in 9 of 215 Ohio
Supreme Court cases featuring donors, and Palmer (2010)
found that judges recused in none of the 425 Louisiana Su-
preme Court cases featuring donors. Although some scholars
have studied whether judges comply with mandatory recusal
provisions (Miller and Curry 2013), legal scholars have pri-
marily focused on whether and when certain legal regimes
require recusal (e.g., Flamm 2017; Marbes 2017).
The literature on recusal suggests a number of hypotheses
about why campaign donations might trigger recusal, even
when doing so is not explicitly mandated by law. These ex-
planations fall into two broad categories: internal and ex-
ternal. By internal we mean that judges might perceive they
have an ethical obligation to step aside when someone with
whom they have a relationship appears in their courtroom.
Recusal is accepted practice when family, friends, or business
partners appear before a judge, in large part because of
concerns about a judge’s impartiality. In light of the survey
evidence cited above, there is good reason to expect that
many trial court judges believe that similar concerns arise if
they were to preside over a case involving a campaign donor.
External reasons, by contrast, involve how relationships
may appear to others. Internal and external concerns may
overlap, as judges may be committed to both preserving the
legitimacy of the judicial system and their own reputations.
Appearances may be especially important for judges who
gain and retain their posts via elections; credible allegations
of favoritism might be fatal to their careers, and recusal may
avoid jeopardizing their electoral prospects. When they do
preside over these cases, elected judges might be particularly
sensitive to any appearance of favorable treatment to their
donors on the grounds that it might hurt them at the ballot
box (Gibson and Caldeira 2012, 2013; Nelson 2014), which
militates in favor of disclosing conflicts of interest.
Whether a judge is responsive to her own internal voice
or concern that voters might learn and disapprove of her
actions in a case involving a campaign donor, both sets of
explanation point in the same direction: judges, all else equal,
should be much more likely to recuse in cases involving
donors than in cases that do not. As we note below, however,
judges only recuse spontaneously in a small share of conflict-
of-interest cases. The question then is whether judges who

face a conflict of interest recuse when urged to do so—a
request that appeals to their sense of propriety but could also
activate external motivations insofar as judges receiving our
treatment might have feared additional publicity in the event
that our communications were publicly disclosed. It is also
possible that the treatment letters induce recusals because
they remind or inform judges which attorneys donated to
their campaign (i.e., judges will not recuse because of con-
flicts of which they are unaware). No matter which causal
pathway is activated by our communication, we expect ele-
vated rates of recusal when an outside party notes the conflict
of interest and requests that the judge step aside.
EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN
The Wisconsin Circuit Courts offer the mixture of institu-
tional features necessary for our study: elected judges, attorney-
specific campaign finance data, sufficient cases that feature
pairs of donor-attorneys and judges, and a timely and search-
able case docket. Federal judges are appointed, and appellate-
level state courts have a limited number of judges. Thirty-nine
states elect trial-level judges, although fewer than 30 feature
pairs of candidates competing for a single position. Of these,
only a handful make campaign finance data readily available,
and even fewer have an online docket system that lends itself
to detailed and frequent searches. As we explain below, the lat-
ter was an essential element for ethical reasons.
At the time of the study, Wisconsin’s 249 trial judges were
assigned to 69 circuit courts whose jurisdictions mostly fol-
low county boundaries. Circuit court judges are elected to
staggered six-year terms in nonpartisan elections that occur
each spring and generally hear both civil and criminal cases.
As we explain below in our discussion of ethics, we restricted
our experiment to specific types of civil cases. We included all
active circuit judges who had raised campaign funds since
2008 and were elected from 2009 to 2014. Because Wisconsin
law exempts state candidates from filing campaign finance
reports if their campaigns raised and spent less than $1,000,
the pool for this experiment is limited to the 113 winning
judges in the 2009–14 elections who were either required to
file reports with the state or who did so voluntarily. The av-
erage total contributions received by these 113 judges was
$35,870, at least 16% of which came from attorneys.2
In order to identify newly assigned cases involving attorney-
donors and judges, we matched campaign finance disclosure
data with information from the Wisconsin Bar Association to
2. This percentage almost certainly underestimates attorney donations.
Any donor-attorneys who did not identify as attorneys in the disclosure
form or did not appear before the donee judge were not included when
calculating the percentage.
Volume 83 Number 4 October 2021 / 000
produce a list of “conflict-of-interest pairs” in which an at-
torney had donated at least $200 to a sitting judge assigned to
the case. We contracted with a vendor that serves Wisconsin’s
law firms to do a weekly search for such pairs from newly
assigned civil cases, then double-checked that the lawyers
involved were the donors on record. Some of the cases flagged
were inherently noncontentious (e.g., name changes and pa-
ternity acknowledgments), too fast moving to treat (e.g., re-
straining orders and injunctions), or so uncontroversial that
judges would be unlikely to take our letter treatments seri-
ously (e.g., small claims). For the cases that remained after
this culling process, we used public information available
through the Wisconsin Circuit Court Access, an online search
engine, to verify case details, check case status, and eventually
code the outcomes of interest. When necessary, we ordered
hard copies of detailed case information through the circuit
court clerks.
Over the course of the experiment (October 2014–
December 2016), we identified 397 civil cases that featured
judge-attorney conflict-of-interest pairs, 270 of which were of
appropriate case types, had been recently assigned to the
judge, and had enough information to verify attorney iden-
tities. None of these cases featured donor-attorneys on both
sides, and of the donor-attorneys in the sample, only four
donated to more than one judge in our sample. In order to
reduce spillover, we did not include otherwise eligible cases if
the judge either had been assigned to the treatment condition
via a previous case (195 cases) or was presiding over a still-
active case that had been assigned to the control group within
the previous 5 months (14 cases). We also excluded any cases
in which the presiding judge would soon be up for reelection
(1 case). These criteria resulted in an experimental pool of
60 cases. Each week, we randomly assigned the newly identified
experimental cases.3 Judges with more than one eligible case
in a given week were dealt with separately, so that just one of
their cases was assigned to be treated (see app. B for a flow-
chart outlining the culling process by which experimental
cases were identified and assigned to treatments).
Judges of cases in the treatment group received a letter (see
app. A for an example) from the Judicial Integrity Project at
Fordham University that reminded them of the donation(s)
received from the attorney, including the amount donated,
and politely requested that they step aside “to maintain public
confidence” in the judicial system. At the advice of outside
3. The probability of assignment in a given week varied slightly be-
cause of rounding errors depending on the number of eligible cases or
when a judge had multiple eligible cases in a given period, since we assigned
no more than one treatment to each judge. Finally, we raised the probability
of assignment from .5 to .67 partway through the study to increase the
number of treated cases.
000 / Campaign Donations, Judicial Recusal, and Disclosure Jonathan S. Krasno et al.
counsel, these letters were sent only to the presiding judges
via UPS next-day delivery with a signature required. Four of
the judges who received our letter contacted the organization
directly for more information and were satisfied with a brief
statement emphasizing its goal of unbiased judicial decision-
making along with the clarification that the notice they had
received was intended for them only.
Five outcomes were tracked for all assigned cases: appli-
cations for recusal, recusals granted, judicial transfers, donor-
attorney withdrawal, and judicial disclosure. Judges in Wis-
consin seeking recusal must submit an application to the
chief judge in their district. We coded both applications and
recusals; in practice, the two turn out to be identical. Because
judges might also seek to address conflicts of interest through
formal channels other than recusal, we measure judicial trans-
fers (nonrecusal changes in judicial authority) and disclosure
(any docket activity or case document, including our treatment
letter, in which the judge discloses the financial relationship
between herself and the attorney).4 The other outcome of in-
terest we measure—whether the donor-attorney left the case—
reflects extrajudicial behavior related to the potential conflict of
interest.
Given the frequency with which active attorneys donate
to judicial campaigns (we identified over 600 Wisconsin
attorneys who had contributed), some may question whether
judicial recusal is even feasible in this context. If donor-
attorneys routinely appear before judges, or if some attorneys
donate to all judges, would the resulting potential conflicts be
too common for recusal to be practical? It turns out that con-
flicts stemming from these contributions are relatively rare. As
we outline below, the total number of donor-judge conflicts
we identified in Wisconsin trial courts over the course of our
experiment was 398, less than 0.1% of civil cases filed, as
reported by the Wisconsin Court System (2017). The sorts of
conflicts we highlight in this experiment are reasonably com-
monplace over the course of a judges’ term, but it is not the case
that judges come across them so frequently that they can rea-
sonably adopt an informal “rule of necessity” precluding re-
cusal on the grounds it would prevent the case from being
adjudicated.
ETHICS
Field experiments have been criticized for their risks to par-
ticipants and society at large. In this case, while only judges
4. Note that we neglected to include disclosures as an outcome of
interest in our preanalysis plan, despite having presented the research
design including disclosures at an academic conference before the plan
was submitted. See app. D for a more detailed discussion of this omission.
The p-values reported below correct for multiple comparisons.
receive a treatment letter, its effects might also be felt by
litigants or attorneys. Given the potentially high stakes of liti-
gation, these concerns were considered with utmost serious-
ness. Beyond the normal institutional review board approval
process (at each author’s home institution), we engaged in an
extensive effort to identify and minimize risks from the outset
of this project, through discussion with scholars, consultation
with legal advisors, and, importantly, examining a sample of
case files from Wisconsin to learn more about the pace of lit-
igation in that state. These deliberations are discussed in detail
in appendix C and helped inform our design in three ways.
First, as we note above, we restricted our inquiry to civil
litigation, excluding criminal trials on the grounds that any
defendant’s potential loss of freedom was too weighty to ex-
pose to experimental manipulation no matter its effect. This
is not to deny the financial consequences of civil litigation,
which may be profound. Our examination of trial records,
however, suggested that civil litigation in Wisconsin generally
proceeds at a relatively slow pace (the average length of time
from case filing to decision for the 60 cases in our study was
345 days) and that litigants rarely make contact with the judge
in any meaningful way such as a pretrial hearing or responsive
pleadings within the first three weeks after a case is filed. This
led to our second decision to limit all treatments to newly
assigned cases, ensuring that judges received missives about
cases to which they and the parties had devoted minimal
resources. One might object that a litigant could be spending
that time strategizing about meeting with a specific judge, but
this struck the experts we consulted as unrealistic, especially
since few of the cases in the experiment involved claims large
enough to justify a lawyer’s time before any filings or meet-
ings. As an extra precaution, we screened and excluded any
cases in which docket activity had occurred in the first few
weeks. Finally, on the advice of attorneys we hired to examine
Wisconsin and federal law, we limit the experimental inter-
vention to private letters delivered only to the judges them-
selves. This constraint effectively prevented us from more
directly testing the impact of external pressures on recusal.
This protocol simplified the logistics of the intervention, at
the cost of potentially weakening its effect, by lessening the
weight of external perceptions from judges’ calculations.
Consideration of the ethics of this experiment would not
be complete without recognizing that its subject itself is ju-
dicial ethics. Campaign contributions by a litigant or lawyer
might easily be construed as an ongoing business relation-
ship, in the sense that they helped a judge attain her current
position. Unlike legislative politics, where candidates typi-
cally raise much more money from many more donors and
the benefits of their policy making are usually widely shared,
elected judges (especially at the trial court level) typically

Table 1. Balance across Treatment Groups
Weighted Mean
Pretreatment Covariate Treatment Group
Judge gender (male) .665
Attorney gender (male) .791
Case type (divorce) .225
Attorney side (plaintiff ) .631
Donation amount $350.5
Attorney’s contributions as share
of total a judge received .033
depend on a small core of financial supporters, and the
decisions they make have immediate consequences for the
donors who appear in their courtrooms. For further dis-
cussion of ethical considerations and their design implica-
tions, see appendix C.
RESULTS
Over the course of the experiment, we assigned 60 circuit
court cases featuring donor-recipient pairs to the control and
treatment conditions. These cases featured 35 judges, had an
average attorney donation of $331, and covered a spectrum
of case types. We treated 28 cases with letters that called
attention to donations ranging from $200 to $1,000. We as-
signed 32 cases to the control condition. Using weighted t-tests
(see table 1), the distribution of assignment to treatment and
control is balanced on judge gender, attorney gender, attorney
side, case type, and donation amount (total amount and pro-
portion of all contributions).5
Our main results are presented in table 2.6 We calculate the
estimated average treatment effects of the recusal letters on
four outcomes of interest (we combine applications for re-
cusal and recusals granted, which are identical in our data set)
and an overall behavioral measure (Any Action) using multi-
variate regressions that account for a number of pretreatment
covariates. We also use block-level inverse probability weights
to account for varying probabilities of assignment. One-tailed
p-values are calculated using randomization inference. We
account for multiple comparisons using a Šidák correction.
One striking feature of the results is the very low base rate
of recusal in the control group. In the absence of our inter-
vention, judges almost never recused themselves from po-
5. Weights reflect the fact that assignment probabilities varied by block.
Accordingly, we weight by the inverse of the probability that each judge was
assigned to her experimental group.
6. Appendix E reports (planned) standard comparison-of-means tests
and covariate subgroup analyses.
Volume 83 Number 4 October 2021 / 000
p-Value (Two-Tailed
Control Group Weighted t-Test)
.651 .913
.673 .310
.210 .894
.730 .432
$333.2 .746
.041 .675
tential conflict cases (just 1 recusal out of 32 cases), never
disclosed the financial relationship on the court record, and
only transferred from four cases. Similarly, the donor-
attorneys in these cases withdrew at low rates. While the low
base rate of recusal is consistent with previous empirical stud-
ies, the absence of disclosure is striking given the emphasis on
transparency in Wisconsin’s Code of Judicial Conduct on this
subject (see Wisconsin Court System 2014). It might be sup-
posed that recusal is a more drastic response to an appearance
of a conflict of interest and therefore less common, while dis-
closure is simpler and inoculates judges from allegations aris-
ing after the fact. Yet, disclosure is as rare as recusal.
Compared to the control group, judges recuse themselves
from a potential-conflict case at slightly higher rates when
they receive a letter requesting recusal (1 recusal out of
28 cases in the experimental group; regression estimates the
average treatment effect to be 1.8 percentage points after
adjusting for covariates), but this difference is much smaller
than we initially expected and falls well short of statistical
significance at the .05 level.7 Judicial transfers proved to be
equally likely in both groups, and attorneys were estimated to
be 5 percentage points more likely to withdraw in the treat-
ment group, a small and statistically insignificant difference.
While the low rate of recusal among treated judges might
suggest that our intervention letters were overlooked or ig-
nored, the high rate of formal disclosure of the donation
relationship in the court record is strong evidence that the
judges took note of the treatments. Judges who received let-
ters asking them to recuse were 33 percentage points more
likely to disclose than judges who did not receive letters, a
result that is statistically significant at the p ! :0001 level
(and remains significant at p ! :05 after a Šidák correction).
It is possible that the number of judges entering the
conflict into the record reflected or generated cross-judge
7. See app. D for a more detailed discussion of power calculations.
000 / Campaign Donations, Judicial Recusal, and Disclosure Jonathan S. Krasno et al.
Table 2. Estimated Average Treatment Effects: Multivariate Regression
Weighted Mean
Outcome Control Group Treatment Group
Recusals granted .031 .037
Judicial transfers .154 .093
Judicial disclosure of conflict .000 .324
Attorney withdrawal .092 .111
Any action** .216 .398
N 32 28
Note. Šidák correction in our model accounts for five outcomes and results in a level of .0102. Coefficients and p-values in bold remain significant at p ! :05
despite the Šidák correction.
* Based on a regression model with the following pretreatment covariates: judge gender, donor-attorney gender, donor-attorney side (plaintiff or re-
spondent), case type (binary—divorce case or not), and the total donation amount given to the judge by the donor-attorney.
** Collapses outcomes of interest and is coded 1 to denote occurrence of at least one of the outcomes, 0 otherwise. This outcome was not included in our
preanalysis plan but was suggested by a reviewer.
spillover effects of some kind. Although it might be the case
that judges discussed the letters with one another, it does not
seem to be the case that this prompted recusals in the control
group. It may be that treated judges decided among them-
selves to ignore the requests for recusal, although in some
ways that communication would redefine the treatment to be
a combination of receiving the letter and discussing it with
colleagues, a combination that could have changed behavior
but evidently proved ineffective.
Because the project extended over several years and judges
were treated no more than once, we were able to observe
treated judges in 195 subsequent cases in which a lawyer con-
tributed to their campaign. We found no instances of dis-
closure, even among those judges who previously disclosed a
conflict. Notably, this included 107 cases involving the same
conflict-of-interest pair of judge and donor. Disclosure is not
a behavior adopted or sustained by judges in the absence of
monitoring by an outside entity.
CONCLUSION
To our knowledge, this study represents the first randomized
field experiment using judicial officials as subjects. As such,
it provides new insights into judicial impartiality and the
sensitivity of elected judges to the appearance of conflicts of
interest. Although the intervention we describe had no ap-
preciable effect on recusal, the normative and theoretical im-
plications of this null finding are far reaching. The private
communications designed to highlight potential conflicts of in-
terest were insufficient to impel judges to step aside, although
they did move a substantial percentage of treated judges to dis-
close this relationship in the record.
Estimated ATE* SE p-Value (One-Tailed)
.018 .053 .319
2.011 .087 .558
.334 .091 .000
.047 .079 .285
.260 .115 .020
One explanation for the results we observe is that, not-
withstanding their sense that campaign donations ought to be
grounds for other judges to recuse, judges may believe they
are capable of acting impartially in their own cases (Marbes
2017). Another possibility is that the intervention we employ
is too circumscribed to inspire action. By restricting ourselves
to private communications, we effectively test only one of
the two sets of reasons why judges might decide to recuse
themselves, essentially an appeal to their own sense of pro-
priety. A question for future research is whether an appeal
to external considerations, such as a threat by a prominent
watchdog organization to call public attention to the appear-
ance of impropriety, would spur more recusals. For the time
being, our experiment contributes a stubborn fact to the lit-
erature on recusal: a private appeal to judicial ethics fails to
impel many judges to recuse themselves from cases litigated by
their campaign donors.
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