We report the results of a survey of over 300 lobbyists in three states—Colorado, Ohio, and West Virginia. In the first half of this article, we provide a comprehensive portrait of state lobbyists' attempts to affect state government decisions. In the second half, we address the following research question: What factors affect the lobbying behavior of state lobbyists? Our results suggest a number of conclusions about lobbying in the new millennium, including the following: (1) state lobbyists target the governor's office more than most previous studies suggest; (2) state lobbyists aim their grassroots lobbying efforts at the governor and executive agency bureaucrats as well as legislators; (3) state lobbying remains an intensely personal game, as techniques involving face-to-face contact with government officials remain the most effective; and (4) several variables affect a lobbyist's decisions regarding which techniques to use and where to aim his or her efforts, including the receptivity of potential targets and the type of group for which the lobbyist works.

While previous work suggests that enacting coalitions' use of ex ante control devices shapes future legislatures' incentives to intervene in the bureaucracy, it is less clear how such insulation motivates individual legislators. We advance an individual-level account of how legislative rule review, a control device that structures an agency's insulation from political interference, differentially shapes legislators' preferences for direct and statutory intervention tactics. Using an original survey of U.S. state legislators, we find that insulation reduces the expected policy benefits of direct interventions, making these tactics less attractive to legislators. Moreover, to capitalize on more permeable agency design, legislators must have access to key resources. For statutory tactics, insulation has no effect on legislators' intervention preferences. Our findings suggest that insulation is a durable control device that casts a long shadow in protecting an enacting coalition's interest in agency affairs.

Research on the public approval of American governors has focused almost exclusively on the impact of economic conditions on fluctuations in such approval. This article adds events variables to a model of gubernatorial public approval including the more commonly used economic variables, and tests this model in a time-series analysis in three states. The results suggest that the effect of political events is minimal and mixed. Furthermore, the analysis does not clearly support any general theory of gubernatorial approval. Instead, the factors that influence public support for governors seem to vary across time and state.

Does the partisanship of officeholders affect environmental outcomes? The popular perception is that Republicans are bad for the environment, but complicating factors like federalism may limit this outcome. Using a dataset that tracks toxic releases over 20 years, we examine how partisan control of executive and legislative branches at both state and federal levels affect environmental policy. Moving beyond the passage of policies or environmental program spending allows us to fully understand the impact of Republicans on the environment. In addition, we take into account structural complications that may shape the relationship between Republican control and environmental outcomes. We find that the conventional wisdom that Republicans are bad for the environment has some validity, but it is dependent on what offices Republican elected officials occupy. More specifically, Republicans significantly affect toxic chemical releases when occupying governorships and controlling Congress. Our conclusions provide further insight into understanding how partisanship affects environmental outcomes, including how partisanship composition across the federal system matters.

Over the past 30 years, the U.S. states have increased their participation as amici curiae significantly, in addition to winning more of their cases as direct parties. However, little attention has been paid to the factors that cause amici participation rates to vary among the states. The author examines the decision of state attorneys general (AGs) to initiate or join amicus curiae briefs in all 253 U.S. Supreme Court criminal procedure cases from 1990 through 2001. He hypothesizes that AGs are motivated largely by their own policy preferences and by their motivation to get reelected. Because amicus briefs are not particularly high-profile policy tools, reelection motivations ought to be demonstrated through responsiveness to elites in state government. The findings provide less support for this idea and more support for the idea that state AGs follow their own policy preferences through amicus participation.

Research on Asian American politics is hampered by data limitations. Asian Americans comprise a small proportion of the population, and few political candidates are of Asian descent. However, because the Asian American population is growing quickly, interest in the group's political behavior has grown. One source of data that can be exploited to understand Asian American political behavior is the state of Hawaii. Hawaii provides a natural experiment since the majority of its citizens are Asian American and Asian political candidates are commonplace. This study of Hawaiian politics focuses on Asian American campaign finance behavior. I find that as Asian Americans locate themselves in more multicultural settings, they become more politically strategic, less focused on national-origin groupings, and more inclined to embrace a pan-ethnic identity.

We utilize a new policy adoption database with over 500 policies to test whether the initiative process influences the timing of policy adoption. Prior studies have produced both supportive and null findings of the effect of the initiative, but typically examine policies one policy or a single composite score at a time. Theoretical accounts suggest that the initiative process should have heterogeneous effects on policy outcomes depending on the configuration of public and government preferences. By pooling hundreds of policies we are able to estimate the average effect of the initiative process on state policy adoption more systematically while also evaluating variation in its effect. We find via a pooled event history analysis that the initiative tends to increase innovativeness, but that this effect can be cancelled out by signature and distribution requirements. We find that this effect varies substantially across policies and is more consistently positive on average in states more liberal populations. We also find evidence that the initiative process moderates the effect of ideology on policy adoption, while making the adoption of non-ideological policies more likely on average.

Recently, we introduced and validated annual state-level estimates of the public's policy mood and party identification from 1956 to 2010 and self-identified political ideology from 1976 to 2010. In this issue, Berry, Ringquist, Fording, and Hanson (BRFH) compare our measure of policy mood with a measure they created, and they conclude that their measure is “the best available indicator of state policy mood for researchers doing pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis.” In this article, we show that BRFH's skepticism of our measure and confidence in their measure result from a failure to fully consider over-time dynamics. When we consider over-time variation, the Enns and Koch measure of policy mood continues to perform well. By contrast, some concerning patterns emerge with the BRFH measure. In addition to further validating the Enns and Koch measure, this article speaks to similarities in opinion change across states and offers initial evidence of an over-time relationship between state policy mood and state spending priorities.

To access funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, state governors had to formally certify their intent to do so within 45 days of the law's enactment. All governors eventually certified, but with considerable variation in celerity. This study employs event history techniques to model the probability of certifying the ARRA. It argues that the statute's design combined with economic distress within the states rendered manifest rejection of the law politically infeasible but, for state officials with certain partisan commitments, left open the possibility of symbolic resistance or support in the form of time to certification. State leaders relied on party identification to guide their decisions, resulting in markedly different propensities toward certification for Republican and Democratic governors. Results lend credence to this thesis: States with Republican governors were nearly 60% less likely to certify the ARRA on a given day than states with Democratic governors. This finding suggests that when economic constraints and policy design foreclose actual rejection of a federal law, state policymakers may rely on party labels to register their approbation or disapprobation through other means, including the amount of time taken to accept federal funding.

One common critique of direct democracy posits that minority rights are endangered by institutions like ballot initiatives and referenda. Empirical research testing this claim, however, has produced conflicting results that leave the question of direct democracy's effect on minority rights open to debate. This study extends previous research by providing a more direct test of this criticism—it compares anti-minority policy proposals from direct democracy states to similar proposals from states without direct democracy institutions. The author examines both ballot proposals and traditional legislative bills to account for both the direct and indirect effects of direct democracy. Analyzing anti-minority proposals from all 50 states from 1995 to 2004 shows that direct democracy states are more likely to pass these proposals than states without direct democracy institutions.

We compare spending in concurrent senate and gubernatorial elections to determine if campaign finance laws influence candidate campaign spending. We find that candidate-based public financing combined with spending limits influence candidate spending, but the effect is largely dependent on the level of the limits. We find that contribution limits do not influence candidate spending. If the goal of reform is to reduce candidate spending—or to affect electoral competition or voter turnout by reducing candidate spending—our results suggest that state public financing is more likely to be successful than contributions limits.

Roll-call data have become a staple of contemporary scholarship on legislative behavior. Recent methodological innovations in the analysis of roll-call data have produced a number of important theoretical insights, such as understanding the structure of congressional decisionmaking and the role of parties and ideology in Congress. Many of the methodological innovations and theoretical questions sparked by congressional scholarship have been difficult to test at the state level because of the lack of comprehensive data on various forms of state legislative behavior, including roll-call voting. The Representation in America's Legislatures project rectifies that problem through collection of comprehensive state legislative roll-call votes across all 99 state legislative chambers for the 1999–2000 and 2003–04 legislative sessions. In this article, we describe the data available through this project as well as our data acquisition procedures, including Stata and Perl programming and OCR of paper documents, with suggestions about how to use these methods to collect a wide range of state-level data.

Public approval is an important tool for chief executives. It helps predict their re-election success and it may translate into greater legislative and administrative policy success. Does a governor's personality influence his or her public approval? We address this question by examining the effects of three gubernatorial motives—affiliation-intimacy, achievement, and power—on public approval. We hypothesize that governors who are especially motivated by affiliation-intimacy will be more successful with the public. However, we find that governors motivated by a desire for power have greater public approval, while the affiliation-intimacy motive is unrelated to approval. Furthermore, the achievement motive is negatively related to approval in our data. We contrast these results with our earlier findings that a combination of power and achievement motives leads to gubernatorial success in the legislative arena. It appears that personality is important in determining gubernatorial success with both the public and the legislature, but in decidedly different ways.

In the last 30 years, female state legislative representation in the United States has increased steadily and dramatically. While the cross-sectional variation in this representation has been studied at length, longitudinal changes have yet to be explained. We attempt to do this using two theories of large-scale cultural and political attitude change over the last several decades—postmaterialism and post-industrialism. Our empirical analyses are more consistent with post-industrialism theory than postmaterialism theory. We find that both cross-sectional differences and longitudinal changes in the percentage of state legislators who are female are explained primarily by college education and religious adherence, not age cohort or income. The effects of college education and religious adherence remain strong even in the presence of controls for other cultural and institutional variables that have been found to influence the sexual composition of state legislatures. Thus, our study suggests the existence of an education-religion cleavage on social issues among Americans.

Is there an opposition bias in ballot initiative campaigns? While some early research suggested that the “no” side was advantaged in ballot initiative campaigns, recent work has demonstrated that both opposition and support spending in ballot measure campaigns are effective. We offer a new way to conceptualize status quo orientation in ballot measure elections. Specifically, we argue that opposition arguments are more effective than support arguments because of the well-known framing negativity bias and not because the starting position for uninformed voters is to default to no. We present the results of two survey experiments to test the impact of support and opposition arguments in ballot initiative campaigns. We find consistent evidence that opposition arguments are effective in generating more “no” votes and that support arguments are ineffective in generating more “yes” votes.

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.

Contrary to media reports, California's 2003 recall election was anything but a circus. Despite the presence of 135 candidates, just 3 managed to split 94% of the vote, and the winner came close to achieving a majority. In this article, the author uses elite interviews and a social network analysis of campaign donations to study how the Republican Party sought to impose order on the potentially chaotic political environment. The author finds that a network of Republican donors, activists, and officeholders coordinated their efforts to advantage Arnold Schwarzenegger and pressure other Republicans out of the race.

One of the oldest and most distinctive characteristics of American political culture is its anti-government, anti-politician bias. One manifestation of this attitude in state government today is the effort to maintain part-time “citizen” legislatures, whether through term limits, low salaries, or session length restrictions. But, realistically, how part-time is the job of a state legislator? We discuss findings from a national survey of state legislators in which they report spending more time on the job than one might anticipate given the presumably part-time nature of many state legislatures. As expected, we find that legislators serving in bodies characterized as full-time, professional legislatures spend more time on the job than those in part-time institutions, but we also see significant variation across states in both groups. We also find considerable variation among individual legislators, which is related to factors such as holding a leadership position and a legislator's demographic characteristics. We also show how time on the job is allocated among specific components of representation.

Scholars have done an admirable job explaining the political forces behind the build up in punitive crime policies over the past three decades. This research investigates whether one of these factors—the politics of race—structures the extent to which crime prevention-centered policies are incorporated into states' correctional systems. Using the General Social Survey to create reliable aggregate measures of racial attitudes across the states, I question the extent to which racial attitudes and racial context impact states' propensity to incorporate “softer” prisoner rehabilitation services into their correctional systems. Results show that whites' attitudes toward African Americans and the size of a state's minority population influenced the percentage of prisoners in each state that receive access to education and mental health services in 1995 and 2000. In states with greater racial diversity and states in which whites are less tolerant toward African Americans, state prisoners are less likely to receive rehabilitation services.

It is widely believed that direct democracy, in the form of the initiative, brought about cuts in state taxes and spending over the last quarter century. This belief is based on firsthand observation, case studies, and more than a dozen statistical studies (Matsusaka 2004). Marschall and Ruhil (2005) focus on one of the central issues in this literature: Did the initiative cause this perceived reduction in taxes and spending, or was there some unmeasured factor that led to adoption of the initiative as well as spending and tax cuts?