What happens after longstanding policies are overthrown in fierce political battles, events scholars refer to as punctuated equilibrium? Do these new policies remain static and unchanging until the next big punctuation, or do they continue to change in explainable and predictable ways? In this article, we develop a model of postpunctuation policy change grounded in theories of boundedly rational decision-making by policymakers. Uncertain about how well the new policy will perform, policymakers learn to rely on competing interest groups for information or, under certain circumstances, look to other political jurisdictions for cues on how their policies ought to be further refined. We test our predictions by studying changes in state charter school laws from 1996 to 2014. We find evidence of policy change, and even convergence, across states suggesting that policies after punctuation do change in ways explained as reactions to political pressures in an environment fraught with uncertainty.

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.

Research finds that voters benchmark the state's unemployment level to the nation's when holding state policy makers accountable. Yet benchmarking requires some voter knowledge if the standard is to be applied correctly as an accountability rule. This article leverages the fact that voters have more knowledge about their state governors than legislatures assess how much knowledge is necessary for holding these policy makers accountable. Using pooled Cooperative Congressional Election Study data from 2006 to 2016, results find that knowledge has stronger mediating effects for the state legislature than governor. Furthermore, despite the low knowledge levels among voters about the state legislature, collectively there appears to be enough knowledge to hold that policymaking body accountable. The conclusion offers directions for future research.

This article compares three approaches to handling missing data at the state level under three distinct conditions. Using Monte Carlo simulation experiments, I compare the results from a linear model using listwise deletion (LD), Markov Chain Monte Carlo with the Gibbs sampler algorithm (MCMC), and multiple imputation by chained equations (MICE) as approaches to dealing with different severity levels of missing data: missing completely at random (MCAR), missing at random (MAR), and nonignorable missingness (NI). I compare the results from each of these approaches under each condition for missing data to the results from the fully observed dataset. I conclude that the MICE algorithm performs best under most missing data conditions, MCMC provides the most stable parameter estimates across the missing data conditions (but often produced estimates that were moderately biased), and LD performs worst under most missing data conditions. I conclude with recommendations for handling missing data in state-level analysis.

In the past few decades, the states have gained more discretion over policy adoption and implementation. Some of this expanded discretion has resulted from federal court rulings, as the states have increasingly used these courts to achieve their policy goals. But some states are more successful in the federal courts than others. Why is this? We examine cases argued by states in the United States Courts of Appeals between 1970 and 1996 to answer this question. Contrary to research at the Supreme Court level, we find no overall trend that the states are becoming more efficacious in court over time. We also find that the differences among the states' success in court cannot be attributed simply, or even primarily, to disparities in resources. Rather, case attributes and judicial attitudes provide the best explanations for state success in the Courts of Appeals.

What is the impact of campaign spending on the vote in gubernatorial primaries? Is spending by challengers and incumbents equally effective? Answering these questions could shed light on the effectiveness of incumbent spending in elections generally and on the impact of campaign finance reform. In a two-stage least squares analysis of primaries from 1980 to 2000, this study finds that spending by incumbent governors has no independent impact on their vote share. On the other hand, spending by challengers is effective in attracting votes, even after controlling for challenger quality and incumbent popularity. However, relatively few races are close enough for challenger spending to be decisive. This suggests that to improve gubernatorial primary competition, states would need to increase public campaign funding and spending limits substantially.

Interest groups have many tactics to choose from in pursuing their policy goals. While inside tactics have received considerable scholarly attention, outside tactics have been adopted increasingly by groups of all kinds. We explore one such lobbying tactic by examining the relationship between interest groups and journalists in the American states. Through a survey of statehouse reporters, we find that lobbyists are useful sources of information for these reporters, who even rank them above many more traditional sources of information. Our data also show that contact between interest groups and journalists varies systematically across the states. Specifically, interest groups in states with large or small numbers of interest groups have more contact with journalists than interest groups in states with an average number of groups. Furthermore, journalists in states where interest groups are relatively powerful claim to interact with those groups less than journalists in states where interest groups are less powerful.

Can politically polarizing events bear dividends for extremist lawmakers? Evidence from California legislative financial disclosures suggests they can. During the state's numerous budget shutdowns of the last 30 years, extremist legislators outside their party median could expect greater fund-raising hauls than their more centrist counterparts. The results suggest that polarizing events such as California's perennial budget impasses can make extremist positions more appealing to the polarized political elites who generally fund political campaigns. Regardless of the motivation, however, these results suggest a strong incentive to prolong political discord by extremists—a troubling outcome in cases where supermajority votes are required.

Charter schools enjoy support among Republican and Democratic lawmakers in states and Congress, but little research has examined their support among the electorate. We take advantage of Washington's 2012 charter school ballot initiative—the first voter-approved charter initiative in the United States—to shed light on the politics of school choice at the mass level. Because in-depth, individual-level voter data are often unavailable in state-level elections, we leverage extensive precinct- and district-level data to examine patterns of support and opposition toward the charter school initiative, focusing on how partisanship, ideology, and demographic factors serve to unify or divide voters. Our analysis reveals that the coalition of supporters cut across usual partisan and demographic cleavages, producing somewhat strange bedfellows. This finding has important implications for the strategies advocacy groups may consider as they seek to expand or limit school choice programs via ballot initiatives as opposed to the statehouse, and provides suggestive evidence regarding the evolving shapers of voter support for school choice and ballot initiatives more generally.

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.

I study the consequences of interest group campaign contributions for administrative oversight. Unlike the few previous studies in this area, however, I study the influence in state bureaucracies and at the level of individual groups. Specifically, I test whether campaign contributions to state elected officials influence the outcomes of annual inspections of skilled nursing facilities in 16 states, leveraging the context of state politics in two important ways. First, I consider the differing effects of contributions to the legislative and executive branches. Second, I argue that legislative capacity for oversight influences the efficacy of contributions Regression analysis of inspection results with controls for facility characteristics provides evidence that contributing facilities have better overall inspection results, with a large reduction in citations for severe problems. Furthermore, contributions to legislators reduce overall problems, particularly in less professionalized legislatures, while those to the governor reduce severe ones.

Can minority representation influence policy outputs when decisions are largely governed by formal and informal rules? This article addresses this question using detailed data on school district representation and budgetary allotments in Texas, assessing the link between Hispanic school board representation and budgetary support for bilingual education. My findings suggest that descriptive representation does affect the budgetary process. My analyses also suggest that modeling representation as a role rather than as an input provides greater insight into the representational process.

The Squire Index measuring the professionalization levels of American state legislatures was created three decades ago. In this note, I explain how the 2021 update was compiled. I then document the index’s stability over the years for which it has been measured, present alternative measures to explore a problematic aspect of the index, and finally examine how each of the index’s three components has moved relative to Congress between 1979 and 2021.

Social services in the United States are supplied by both the public and private sectors. Previous political science research has focused on public transfers or Medicaid; I study “Other Public Welfare” programs that include contracts and grants to private social services providers, focusing on the relationship between the two sectors. My results imply that an increase in either Other Public Welfare spending or private individual and family services employees leads to an increase in the other sector. I find weaker evidence of similar relationships involving private residential care or day care services, and private social services employment is generally independent of public spending on transfers and Medicaid. My results have implications for the full effects of changes in public welfare spending, including the effects on the private sector, as well as the effects of organized interests on public welfare spending.

Using survey data in the states from 1981 to 2000, we explore the nature of public sentiment toward members of the U.S. Senate, compare aggregate senator approval to congressional approval, and examine the impact of several factors that may influence approval of both senators and their legislative institution. We hypothesize that presidential approval, partisanship, consumer expectations, inter-branch discord, national scandals, and rally-around-the-flag events will influence both senator and congressional approval. We find evidence that supports the conventional argument that constituents “love” their senators but “hate” Congress. Senators appear to be relatively insulated from factors that sway presidential and congressional approval.

Many important traits of state legislatures vary across chambers within a state. Yet according to existing typologies in the comparative study of bicameralism, the 49 bicameral American state legislatures would be deemed quite homogeneous. To resolve this disjuncture, I identify a novel dimension of bicameralism that distinguishes among state legislatures by capturing the extent to which the two chambers serve as meaningfully different venues for influence. Based on this framework, I develop an index of bicameral “distinctiveness” rooted in three traits that speak to policy influence across chambers: the ratio of seats, bipartisan representation, and constituency dissimilarity. This measure reveals sizable variation across states and a conspicuous geographic pattern, with considerably greater bicameral distinctiveness in the Eastern United States. In turn, I assess the construct validity of this measure, showing how patterns of second chamber bill amendment vary systematically with the level of bicameral distinctiveness.

Although research demonstrates that favorable ballot position can deliver candidates a small windfall of votes in local, nonpartisan, and primary elections, it is not clear whether ballot order laws have had any impact on the composition of U.S. legislatures. In this article, I estimate the substantive significance of ballot order rules by comparing the legislators of states that alphabetically order ballots to those elected by states that randomize or rotate ballot order. I also compare legislators elected by states that started or stopped alphabetically ordering ballots in recent decades. I find that states that alphabetically order ballots disproportionately elect candidates with early alphabet surnames. My research challenges the prevailing belief that ballot order affects only minor elections and suggests that seemingly innocuous rules have altered our political landscape. I conclude that arbitrary ballot ordering rules should be reformed to remedy their substantial impact on political representation.

What explains state agency resistance to actions taken by their federal counterparts? And do sectional tensions make state bureaucratic nonacquiescence particularly likely in the U.S. South? We theorize that state resistance to federal administrative policy is more likely among Southern state bureaus due to administrative sectionalism. We argue that state agencies can and do resist federal administrative orders independent of other political constraints. This study is among the first to consider the policy consequences of sectionalism in state bureaucracies. We test our claims by employing a mixed methods approach that analyzes each instance of litigation and intervention by state bureaucrats in opposition to actions and orders by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) from 2010 to 2017. We find that, all else equal, state agency resistance to federal utility policy is about 3.75 times as likely among Southern utility regulators. This research has important normative implications for administrative politics as it suggests agencies with putatively apolitical policy jurisdiction have political preferences driven by sectional tension.

The parties as networks approach has become a critical component of understanding American political parties. Research on it has so far mainly focused on variation in the placement of candidates within a network at the national level. This is in part due to a lack of data on state-level party networks. In this article, I fill that gap by developing state party networks for 47 states from 2000 to 2016 using candidate donation data. To do this, I introduce a backboning network analysis method not yet used in political science to infer relationships among donors at the state level. Finally, I validate these state networks and then show how parties have varied across states and over time. The networks developed here will be made publicly available for future research. Being able to quantify variation in party network structure will be important for understanding variation in party-policy linkages at the state level.

our initial article challenged three of Brace et al.'s (2004) claims: (1) state citizen ideology is stable over time; (2) the Berry et al. (1998) measure of state citizen ideology is invalid; and (3) assessing the effect of state citizen ideology on state policy requires analysts to first parse out national or across-the-board changes in ideology. By stating that “the authors of the preceding article reinforce most of our substantive points,” Brace et al. (2007, 000) leave the impression that we agree with these claims. We do not. In fact, we see no evidence in this exchange to support any of these claims or to rebut our criticisms of them. To substantiate their first claim Brace et al. (2004) report that residuals from fixed-effects regression models of two measures of state ideological self-identification display few significant time trends. In this issue, we show that the results of the residual analysis are almost certainly artifacts of low statistical power and high measurement error and, hence, cannot support their claim. Brace et al. defend their second claim by showing that Berry et al.'s measure of citizen ideology both produces far more statistically significant time trends than do the two measures of ideological self-identification and is weakly correlated with these two measures. In response, we once again point to the artifactual nature of their regression residual results and note that Brace et al. (2001) report incorrect correlations. These empirical criticisms are independent of the distinction we draw between policy mood and self-identification; were we to abandon this distinction completely, which we recommend against on theoretical grounds, these criticisms of Brace et al. (2004) would still apply. We reject Brace et al.'s third claim that changes in state citizen ideology associated with national trends cannot meaningfully influence state public policyon logical grounds, noting that across-the-board changes in state ideology may very well produce changes in state public policy.