Do state legislators use media tactics in policy-making? If so, which legislators, how often, and to what ends? Despite a number of recent studies asserting the importance of the media in American politics, we still have not answered these basic questions. Using a survey of state legislators from California, Georgia, and Iowa, I find that state legislators frequently use media tactics in policy-making, although they still prefer traditional forms of legislating. While the bulk of their media tactics is aimed at constituents, state legislators also target policy elites. This suggests that state legislators use the media for more than just aiding in their re-election. Finally, my analyses suggest that the frequency with which legislators use media tactics is largely a function of the resources at their disposal.

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.

State legislative elections are increasingly shaped by two factors that influence the prospects of winning a majority: the redistricting cycle and partisan tide elections. Winning control of the redistricting process offers the prospect of shaping elections for the next decade, making majority status significantly more valuable than it otherwise might be. Partisan tides, on the contrary, can dramatically alter perceptions of which seats are safe or vulnerable and of whether majority status is obtainable or not. In this article, I examine how the proximity of redistricting and the presence of partisan tides are reflected in the strategies of the party organizations that contest state legislative elections. Using party finance data from 29 states during the period from 1996 to 2010, I find that parties' majority-seeking behavior is more intense in states with legislative redistricting, when redistricting is imminent, and when partisan tides favor the minority party.

While much scholarly research has focused on the quality of candidates in U.S. elections, the quantity of candidate participation has received much less attention. Consequently, there is little systematic evidence on what factors stimulate or dampen candidate entry into electoral contests, especially at the state level. In this article, we examine the effects of electoral laws, states' social and political climates, and incumbency on gubernatorial candidacies. We test our claims using an event-count model with the number of candidates contesting each gubernatorial election from 1980 to 2005 as the outcome of interest. We divide total candidate participation into major and third party candidates to observe whether the factors affect neither, one, or both types of candidacies. We find that electoral laws and incumbency play an important role in determining the number of candidacies in these elections, but the effect of these factors varies for the two types of candidates.

In 15 American states, environmental protection agencies perform both pollution-control and natural resource conservation functions. In this study, I examine how this combination of functions affects the regulatory style embraced by these agencies. I find, through interviews with environmental agency workers and empirical analyses using enforcement data from 2010 to 2014, that the cooperation and flexibility with industry inherent to natural resource conservation efforts is a fundamental part of the regulatory process within these combined agencies. Great efforts are made to garner voluntary or negotiated compliance without the possible economic consequences of punitive actions. Enforcements are less frequent and less severe. The effect of this agency design choice is powerful, maintaining its effect even when controlling for political, ideological, and economical pressures. In a time where environmental protection agencies are increasingly interested in incorporating management-based regulation and voluntary compliance to supplement command and control regulation, it is more important than ever to understand the regulation that emerges from this combination.

We use the case of education interest groups to examine how and when policy changes lead interest groups to polarize in their support for political parties. Using over 145,000 campaign contributions from all 50 states from 2000 to 2017, we test whether the passage of private school choice, charter laws, and labor retrenchment policies led to the polarization of education interest groups over time. In 2000, teachers unions were the dominant group and mostly aligned with Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans lacked support from any education groups. This pattern was consistent across states. Over time, coalitions in some states became polarized, meaning unions grew even more aligned with Democrats and reform groups with Republicans, while other states did not experience such polarization. We show that private school choice programs, but not labor retrenchment or charter laws, contributed to this changing partisan alignment. Our findings demonstrate that policy feedback can shape both the electoral mobilization and party alignments of interest groups.

The article assesses two predictions made by term limits advocates: that term limits would increase electoral competition and enhance demographic representation in state legislatures. Although term limits may indeed have these consequences in some places and some times, their early effects in Florida do not provide support for these predictions. Our analysis suggests that state legislative seats that have opened up as the result of term limits yielded races with no smaller margins of victory than in previous elections, nor were they more likely to be contested by the two major political parties. Likewise, we found no significant increase in the representation of minorities or women in the Florida State Legislature after term limits.

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.

Although the U.S. judiciary is designed to be an independent and counter-majoritarian arbiter of the law, many states feature electoral institutions that may expose judges to public pressure. Scholars have demonstrated that judicial elections provide a clear link between public opinion and judicial decision making that may undermine the ability of courts to act in counter-majoritarian ways to protect minority rights. We extend this line of inquiry by examining whether direct democracy institutions have a similar effect of enhancing the impact of public opinion on judicial behavior and reducing the likelihood of judges voting in favor of minority rights. Empirical results from an analysis of gay rights cases in the American states from 1981 to 2004 provide evidence that direct democracy, in conjunction with electoral retention methods, significantly increases the effect of public opinion on judicial decisions.

Previous research has found strong evidence of a pro-winner vote misreport bias in the National Election Studies (NES). We extend this research by examining the reported vote for U.S. senator and governor in the 1990, 1992, and 1994 NES and in the 1990 and 1992 Senate Election Studies (SES). We find continuing evidence of a pro-winner misreport problem. In contrast, we uncover no significant pro-winner bias in state exit polls conducted by the media. We test two commonly asserted explanations of the source of this misreport bias, but find no evidence that the problem is related either to the number of days between the election and the survey interview or to incumbency. Finally, we test a model of the misreport process that suggests that less politically engaged and less politically sophisticated voters are most likely to over-report support for the winner. Our results here are mixed; we find some evidence that Independents are more likely to misreport in favor of the winner, but we find no evidence that education level affects the likelihood of misreporting.

What led elites in some U.S. states to surrender policy-making power to voters between 1898 and 1918, while leaders elsewhere retained only representative democracy? The authors argue that progressives behaved as strategic politicians by supporting direct democracy when they were stymied at achieving their goals in the legislature and were confident that the voters who would be empowered by initiatives that agreed with progressive policies. They made their delegation of power conditional on who would receive it. The presence of these underlying conditions made adoption of the citizen initiative likely, the authors posit, while the timing of reforms came when insurgent reformers had a strong presence in state government, when the results of a galvanizing election sent a clear signal, or when the adoption of the initiative in one state diffused to its neighbors. Exploring these hypotheses by analyzing a new data set, the authors find strong support for their expectations about the conditions that created fertile ground for direct democracy.

In this article, we develop and make available measures of public ideology in 2010 for the 50 American states, 435 congressional districts, and state legislative districts. We do this using the geospatial statistical technique of Bayesian universal kriging, which uses the locations of survey respondents, as well as population covariate values, to predict ideology for simulated citizens in districts across the country. In doing this, we improve on past research that uses the kriging technique for forecasting public opinion by incorporating Alaska and Hawaii, making the important distinction between ZIP codes and ZIP Code Tabulation Areas, and introducing more precise data from the 2010 Census. We show that our estimates of ideology at the state, congressional district, and state legislative district levels appropriately predict the ideology of legislators elected from these districts, serving as an external validity check.

Despite calls for greater deliberation among citizens on public policy, we have little information about how existing deliberation is structured or how well it works. We examine Connecticut's effort to put public deliberation to work in Medicaid policymaking. Findings from our participant-observation study and in-person interviews with 100 participants in this process suggest some important qualifications to literature on public deliberation. Greater inclusion of diverse social groups from the target population is important, but this should not replace the inclusion of professional advocates since the latter are often more willing than citizen representatives to challenge policy experts on technical issues. Incorporating public deliberation into the process at an early stage is ideal, but deliberation during the later stages of policymaking (including during implementation) can still produce useful results. Finally, the style and purpose of deliberation can shape the range of topics on the agenda, so it is important to understand how the structure of a deliberative forum can affect the style and purpose of deliberation.

We examine the effects of state economic conditions on gubernatorial popularity using time-series analyses of gubernatorial approval ratings for 10 states. We find that although unemployment rates affect some governors' approval ratings, the dynamics of gubernatorial approval are highly idiosyncratic. Our results suggest that a single model may be inadequate to describe patterns of public approval, even for candidates elected to similar offices. The unique personal characteristics of the officeholder, as well as differing constituent expectations, may be at least as important as the general economic variables typically included in models of public approval.

Recently, many U.S. states that allow citizen initiatives have passed laws designed to make it more difficult for an initiative to qualify for the ballot (e.g., by increasing the number of signatures required to get on the ballot), thereby making it harder for citizens to bypass the legislature and make direct changes to public policy. Such laws have reduced both the number of measures that make the ballot and the number that pass on Election Day. I show that laws governing access of initiatives to the ballot also shape the policy agenda; provisions making it harder for proposals to get on the ballot decrease the complexity of the initiatives on the ballot. As less complex initiatives are more likely to be understood by voters and voters are reluctant to vote for measures they do not understand, more restrictive laws actually increase the likelihood that an initiative will pass.

State politics researchers commonly employ ordinary least squares (OLS) regression or one of its variants to test linear hypotheses. However, OLS is easily influenced by outliers and thus can produce misleading results when the error term distribution has heavy tails. Here we demonstrate that median regression (MR), an alternative to OLS that conditions the median of the dependent variable (rather than the mean) on the independent variables, can be a solution to this problem. Then we propose and validate a hypothesis test that applied researchers can use to select between OLS and MR in a given sample of data. Finally, we present two examples from state politics research in which (1) the test selects MR over OLS and (2) differences in results between the two methods could lead to different substantive inferences. We conclude that MR and the test we propose can improve linear models in state politics research.

How does the demand for lobbying reflected by government policy activity influence the use of lobbying strategies and tactics? The authors examine this question by assessing how the complexity of the policy space affects the political action committee (PAC) system. They hypothesize that the complexity of the policy space indirectly affects the size and activity of the PAC system through its direct effect on interest organization density. The authors test this hypothesis within the health sector using a unique data set that connects individual interest organizations registered to lobby U.S. state legislatures with active PACs in the state. It appears that social, economic, and political measures of policy space complexity influence the size of the lobbying community, which in turn influences the size and activity of the PAC community.

In this paper, we analyze how variations in partisan representation across different levels of government influence Americans’ satisfaction with the democracy in the United States. We conduct two survey experiments and analyze data from the 2016 American National Election Study postelection survey. We find that Americans are the most satisfied with democracy when their most preferred party controls both the federal and their respective state governments. However, we also find that even if an individual’s least preferred party only controls one level of government, they are still more satisfied with democracy than if their most preferred party controls no levels of government. These findings suggest that competition in elections across both the national and state government, where winning and losing alternates between the two parties, may have positive outcomes for attitudes toward democracy.

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.

How do term limits affect the electoral changes caused by state legislative redistricting? To answer this question, we compare the success of majority parties in the redistricting process in legislatures with and without term limits. We hypothesize that majority parties use the districts of term-limited members to redistribute supporters from safe districts to more competitive ones. We find that, indeed, the majority party changes district lines more in districts with term-limited legislators. Furthermore, the majority party is more strategic in reallocating voters for partisan gain in term-limited districts. Thus, our findings suggest that term limits make the redistricting process more partisan and that a reform intended to remove incumbents from the legislature actually strengthens the majority party.