Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2021
Publication
Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law
Volume
19
Abbreviation
Ohio St. J. Crim. L.
First Page
125
Abstract
While it is clear that a debate is happening about new approaches to the prosecutor's work, it is less clear how deep the changes go. Given the large number of prosecutor offices in the United States, it is possible that much of the change that the media documents is limited to only a few offices; it is also possible that newsworthy stories of recent prosecutor campaign debates are merely the most visible layer of a change that goes deeper. Do the media accounts focus on vivid but exceptional election campaigns, or do news stories over the' last decade reflect a period of widespread change in U.S. prosecution leadership?
We explore this question by collecting the results from prosecutor elections in 200 high-population districts in the United States between 2012 and 2020." Setting aside the difficult issues of measuring how much change a candidate proposes to implement in the prosecutor's office - or how "progressive" those changes might be - we simply ask whether prosecutor election campaigns are becoming less favorable for incumbents over time.