Policy Making and Appointments under Electoral and Judicial Constraints

Many democratic systems supplement periodic elections with checks and balances. Yet, elected executives typically have some influence on one important check, the judicial branch, through their power to nominate justices. How do electoral and judicial constraints influence which policies executives pursue and which justices they nominate? We study a game-theoretic model of electoral accountability in which an executive chooses policy and appoints a justice, who can overturn policy today and (potentially) after the election. We highlight how judicial appointments provide executives a tool for signaling and commitment and also affect their incentives to signal with policy. We characterize how executives combine policy and appointments differently depending on judicial turnover, polarization, office motivation, or ideologies of sitting justices. We find that elections can moderate appointments but can also polarize them, reforms increasing justice turnover can backfire and reduce voter welfare, and distinct forms of polarization can have critically different effects.