Conventional wisdom suggests that incumbent politicians use the resources of office to create an electoral advantage. But Cox and Katz (2002) argue that at least part of this incumbency advantage in the United States House of Representatives can be attributed to the strategic entry and exit decisions of incumbents. We test this claim by taking advantage of the natural experiment provided by state legislative term limits in California. By comparing different types of open seats, we identify the strategic component of the incumbency advantage that exists above and beyond the resource-based advantage. The vote loss suffered by the incumbent party is smaller in term-limited seats than in voluntary open seats, indicating that incumbents do sometimes leave when their electoral prospects look dim. Further evidence of this strategic component is that quality challengers run more often in voluntary open seats, while quality incumbent-party replacements run disproportionately in term-limited seats.

The controversial presidential election of 2000 triggered a wide variety of electoral reforms in many states. We examine the impact of a state's politics, ethnicity, and fiscal health on the passage of these reforms. Using state-level data from 2001 and 2002, we find that the partisan make-up of state government frequently influenced the fate of these reforms. States with a divided government or high party competition tended not to adopt several key electoral reforms, while partisanship and the interaction of partisanship and minority representation influenced the adoption of others. Fiscal constraints and institutional arrangements had less impact on reform adoption. Overall, our findings suggest that electoral reforms were shaped more by political factors than by fiscal concerns or any objective need for reform.

In November 1996, voters cast ballots for candidates running for 57 seats on 15 community advising and zoning boards in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Voters had little knowledge about the candidates or the boards that had been created only a few months earlier. The candidates campaigned for seven weeks. The local media generally ignored them. There were no incumbents and no party labels in the non-partisan contests. In low-information local elections such as these, voter cues and ballot design plays a decisive role in voter choice. The cues in this election were candidates' gender, ethnicity, campaign expenditures, and ballot position. Our results indicate that the most important cue was candidate gender; however, voters used ethnicity to decide whether they voted for men or women. The number of candidates on the ballot impacted vote share, while ballot position played no significant role. Those candidates who spent the most campaign money were also preferred. We argue that vote cues provide a means to address voter fatigue, where gender, ethnicity, and name recognition provide cues in this low-information, high voter fatigue situation. Our results suggest that by spending greater on their campaigns, Hispanic women—the most disadvantaged of the candidates—could run competitively against Hispanic men.

Fiorina (1992, 1994) argued that increased professionalism of state legislatures in the 1970s and 1980s increased Democratic control of those bodies. While some subsequent empirical studies have been consistent with this hypothesis, doubt remains about the causal connection of this relationship. Our review of Fiorina's theoretical argument leads us to add legislative district size as a conditioning element to the model. Using data from state legislatures in 1960-98, we find that such a model supports the claim that the empirical connection between legislative professionalism and Democratic electoral success is causal and not spurious.

Committees became a vital component of the decisionmaking process in most legislative bodies around the world during the 20th century. However, very little is known about how their status evolved. In particular, the complexity of, and variation among, committee systems have made it difficult for researchers to assess fully their role in lawmaking. We present a way to measure the structural nature of committee power in state legislatures in the United States, providing data rating 33 upper and lower chambers on six dimensions of committee power based on various legislative documents for 10 legislative sessions during the 20th century. Our method of measurement and these data should help researchers to better understand the evolution of legislative committee systems.