This article provides a new measure of state-level attitudes toward gender roles. Our series, gender equality mood, spans from 1972 to 2010 and is the first measure to capture variation in gender-role attitudes across states and over time. The series is created using two leading techniques for opinion estimation: multilevel regression and poststratification and survey aggregation. We conclude by discussing several research areas in which our measure of gender equality mood may be especially useful.

The measure of legislative professionalization I developed was first published a quarter century ago. Since then, updates have appeared periodically. In this note, I briefly document the measure's usefulness in academic research and then calculate it for 2015. For reasons I detail, the updated measure is corrected for a misestimate of days in session for some states.

According to reformers, legislative term limits should increase voter turnout by enhancing electoral competitiveness for legislative seats. However, this claim has been largely untested. The only existing study of the effect of legislative term limits on voter turnout, to date, finds that turnout in California did not increase after the imposition of term limits and may have decreased turnout. Yet, it is unclear whether this result generalizes to other states. This study employs a comparative state analysis of both aggregate turnout and district-level turnout rates in state legislative elections. We find that term limits significantly increase voting rates in state legislative elections.

This article examines the differential effects of social capital on policy equity in state outcomes. Specifically, it explores the relationship between social capital and incarceration rates in the American states paying particular attention to racial disparities in incarceration rates. Building on work by Hero, I present a theoretical explanation and empirical support for how social capital operates differently under different racial contexts. I argue that social capital enhances social empathy in homogeneous contexts and social controls in diverse contexts. Using state-level longitudinal data on the contiguous states, I find that social capital is positively associated with incarcerations, but only for African Americans. Furthermore, the effects of social capital appear to be conditional on racial context where this relationship is stronger as minority group size increases.

Legislative committees rely on the expertise and experience of their members, but instability in committee systems threatens the enhancements in productivity associated with specialization. This can occur in two ways, both of which are more common in state legislative committees than they are in Congress. First, membership retention on committees is generally lower, even after accounting for differing levels of legislative turnover across legislatures. Second, many state legislative committee systems undergo reorganization between sessions, changing the policy jurisdictions, and, therefore, the applicability of members' previously developed expertise. In this article, I examine the consequences of these two sources of committee instability on legislative output in 14 state legislatures. I find that both membership retention and jurisdictional reorganization significantly affect the number of bills processed through committees and the number of bills ultimately enacted. These linkages are also conditioned on several committee and institutional factors, particularly legislative turnover. Last, I find a weaker but discernible effect of membership retention on committees' propensity to perform their gatekeeping role.

Does direct democracy strengthen popular control of public policy in the United States? A major challenge in evaluating policy representation is the measurement of state-level public opinion and public policy. Although recent studies of policy responsiveness and congruence have provided improved measures of public opinion using multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) techniques, these analyses are limited by their static nature and cross-sectional design. Issue attitudes, unlike more general political orientations, often vary considerably over time. Unless the dynamics of issue-specific public opinion are appropriately incorporated into the analyses, tests of policy responsiveness and congruence may be misleading. Thus, we assess the degree of policy representation in direct democracy states regarding same-sex relationship recognition policies using dynamic models of policy adoption and congruence that employ dynamic MRP estimates of attitudes toward same-sex marriage. We find that direct democracy institutions increase both policy responsiveness and congruence with issue-specific public opinion.

Legislators might rely on their partisan base for electoral support—what scholars call their normal vote—or they may cultivate support among nonpartisans through casework or constituency service—what scholars call a personal vote. Previous research frequently argues that legislators face a tradeoff between pursuing the normal vote and a personal vote as traditionally defined, often focusing on resources used by incumbents to build their personal vote. In contrast, we argue that securing the support of partisans and nonpartisans alike should be evaluated based on how a legislator performs in office, and that the so-called normal and personal vote need not be viewed as in conflict. We evaluate our claims using data from state legislative elections following redistricting, focusing on legislative professionalism to measure the resources available to incumbents that they might use to cultivate a personal note.