Monetizing Prosecutorial Discretion

Abstract Campaign contributions – their salience, how they distribute, and their implications for political accountability and local control – have been studied extensively in the executive, legislative, and, increasingly, state judicial contexts. How reported campaign contributions vary across local prosecutor candidates as well as inform prosecutor election outcomes, however, are comparatively less well understood despite an increasing amount of campaign contributions flowing into local prosecutor elections over time. Drawing from a leading and recently released dataset that links campaign information from 3,123 local prosecutor candidates and the most recent election cycles across 2,205 districts between 2012 and 2019, this study seeks to develop an initial accounting of factors which plausibly inform local prosecutor candidates’ campaign fundraising success. To do so, the models evaluate how reported campaign contributions distribute at the individual candidate and district levels and separate contested and uncontested prosecutor elections. When it comes to campaign contribution totals, while findings from contested and uncontested election models, as expected, evidence important differences, these differences are generally stable across the candidate and district levels. Comparing findings from candidate- and district-level models, by contrast, uncovers an important difference involving incumbency status. Taken together, the findings make clear that while campaign contributions inform prosecutor election outcomes, factors that inform fundraising success vary across contested and uncontested elections as well as across candidate- and district-levels. These variations, in turn, raise important distributional concerns.