The American states provide, arguably, the world's most advantageous venue in which to test general propositions about political behavior and policymaking (Jewell 1982; Brace and Jewett 1995). One would be hardpressed to design a better system of polities for conducting political research. The states represent fifty units of analysis with broadly similar political structures, cultures, and populations, but with significant variation across a range of social, policy, and institutional characteristics important to many political theories. Unlike the examination of single units of government, such as the U.S. federal government, the variation in these characteristics allows scholars to test hypotheses of cause-and-effect relationships of political behavior and policymaking in a valid way. But unlike the comparison of different countries, the comparison of states does not produce so much variation that it overwhelms scholars' ability to identify relationships that might exist. Just as the states are a natural laboratory for public policy (New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann 1932), they are also a natural laboratory for testing hypotheses derived from political theory. Furthermore, the accessibility of state government officials makes quite feasible many research strategies that would be unthinkable in the study of federal officials and institutions.

In 1996, more than half of the states considered legislation banning same-sex marriages. This article examines these events as a geographic expansion of the scope of the conflict rather than as traditional state-centered policy innovation. I argue that the diffusion of same-sex marriage bans was determined by the organized efforts of advocacy coalitions and internal state characteristics rather than by regional diffusion or communication among policy experts. I use state-level data collected from activists, media accounts, and official sources to establish the organized efforts to ban same-sex marriage. I then develop and empirically test a model of policy diffusion to predict both state consideration and adoption of policies banning same-sex marriage. The findings suggest that the diffusion of these policies is best explained by the presence of an organized national campaign by conservative religious groups, the local resources of interest groups, and other internal state characteristics rather than by regional diffusion patterns. I also find that the influence of state characteristics may vary during the policymaking process.

Students of race and politics in the U.S. have long asserted a relationship between the racial composition and public policies of states. A related but distinct line of research demonstrates a strong connection between white attitudes about the perceived recipients of social welfare spending—blacks and members of other minority groups—and support for these programs. This article bridges these lines of scholarship by asking how racial diversity shapes aggregate attitudes about minorities in the American states and how these opinions in turn influence welfare spending. Using public opinion data from the General Social Survey (1974–96), I find that diversity has a direct influence on welfare policy in the states, as well as an indirect influence through shaping majority-group racial attitudes. Diversity and racial attitudes are found to have these effects even when controlling for factors traditionally used to explain variation in state spending levels, such as party competition, lower class mobilization, ideology, and state capacity.

Recent macro-level studies examining the indirect effects of direct legislation on public policy in the American states are decidedly mixed. This study tests whether the macro-level logic of legislative behavior in response to ballot initiatives holds true at the micro-level for individual legislators. I examined the determinants of legislative votes on “counter-majoritarian” legislation—bills that directly challenge the outcomes of earlier statewide ballot initiatives. In 1999, the Colorado state legislature tried to overturn the outcomes of three previous ballot contests. I find that in two of the three cases, a legislator's vote on these bills was related to the vote in his or her district on the respective ballot initiative. This helps explain why many legislators will vote contrary to the outcome of a statewide initiative vote.

We test the “white backlash” hypothesis—that white racial conservatism grows as black population density increases—using methods and data parallel to those upon which the concept was originally developed. A 1996 Kentucky referendum vote to strike school segregation from the state constitution serves as a rare measure of “old-fashioned racism.” We estimate the white vote for segregation using ecological inference techniques, and show that the county-level pattern of white segregationist support for this referendum actually runs in the opposite direction from that predicted by the backlash hypothesis. Precinct-level Kentucky analysis and county-level analysis of a related South Carolina referendum validate our finding against the white backlash hypothesis. We conclude that the frequent failure of recent research to find white backlash, especially among urban voters, therefore cannot be explained away by the absence of measures of old-fashioned racism. Rather, the geographical pattern of American racial conservatism seems to have changed since the successes of the Civil Rights movement.

This essay places state supreme courts in state politics by tracking some of the major lines of research on these important institutions, documenting the importance of state supreme courts, and illustrating important variations among state supreme courts on a host of factors, including docket composition, the exercise of judicial review, litigant patterns, and turnover rates. Through analyses of original data on separation-of-powers relationships in the abortion controversy, it also provides a brief empirical demonstration of how courts influence and are influenced by the political and policy processes operating in the states, and how comparative research helps resolve fundamental controversies in political science. We conclude that there is a remarkable and unfortunate asymmetry between the political importance of state supreme courts and the attention given to them by the research community. Moreover, by capitalizing on the analytical advantages of comparative state judicial politics scholarship, scholars will be able to solve some of the most complex puzzles in the study of state politics.

The surveys of Senate races from 1988 to 1992 conducted by the American National Election Study include a number of issue questions that can be aggregated to measure state public opinion. A simple-to-compute coefficient is used to judge the aggregated reliability of these measures. A comparison of these state public opinion measures on specific issues to more general indicators, such as state ideology and partisanship, demonstrates their usefulness in obtaining a richer depiction of public preferences for studies of state politics.