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We study how two selection systems for public officials, appointment and election, affect policy outcomes, focusing on state court judges and their criminal sentencing decisions. First, under appointment, policy congruence with voter preferences is attained through selecting judges with homogeneous preferences. In contrast, under election, judges face strong reelection incentives, while selection on preferences is weak. Second, the effectiveness of election in attaining policy congruence critically depends on payoffs from the job, which implies that the effectiveness of election may vary substantially across public offices. Third, reelection incentives may discourage judges with significant human capital from holding office. (JEL D72, K41)Understanding systems concerning the selection and retention of public officials and their effects on policy outcomes has long been an important issue in economics (e.g., Barro 1973 andFerejohn 1986). In this paper, we compare two selection systems for public officials, appointment by the head of the executive branch and election by popular votes. We study the influence of the selection systems on public officials' behavior, focusing on state court judges and their criminal sentencing decisions. Specifically, we quantitatively assess the separate role of preference heterogeneity versus reelection incentives in determining sentencing decisions.We focus on the behavior of state court judges in the State of Kansas, which has within-state variation in the selection systems. 1 We conduct three key analyses. First, we exploit variation in sentencing decisions across jurisdictions and over time to quantitatively assess how much preferences and reelection incentives differently affect judges' decisions under the two systems. Secondly, we conduct simulations to 1 Even though data from one state may not provide as wide a perspective as national-scale data, they help us to avoid problems caused by substantial heterogeneity in state laws that complicate cross-state analysis. Kansas can also be regarded as a "typical" state in terms of the characteristics of the legal profession. In terms of the population/lawyer ratio, a ratio strongly correlated with the degree of urbanization of the legal profession, it is ranked twenty-fifth among the fifty US states. For details, see Carson (2004).

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