This article examines the impact of electoral politics on state welfare policy in the post-civil rights era South. In contrast to an emerging consensus concluding that southern African Americans materially benefited from rejoining the electorate, this study suggests that higher black registration rates actually reduced states' poverty relief efforts. In the years immediately following the Voting Rights Act (VRA), when Democrats controlled state government, the significant negative relationship between the size of the black electorate and state welfare generosity was moderated to some extent by high levels of partisan competition. In such cases, Democrats ostensibly chose a “core” targeting strategy of pursuing lower-income votes and had the institutional wherewithal to purchase these votes with policy concessions. Overall, however, the liberal “Downsian” policy response to African American mobilization was dominated by an antiredistributive response. In the South, welfare policies were relatively conservative vis-à-vis the other states during Jim Crow and became more so in response to black voting.

The power of conference committees is well documented and studied by scholars of the US Congress. But little is known about politics of bicameral agreement within state legislatures. Leveraging variation across states, I explore the conditions under which legislative leaders prefer formal bicameral conference negotiations to informal talks to reach final legislative agreements. Deploying an original dataset of state legislative decisions between 2005 and 2018, I find that ideologically cohesive majority parties favor the use of conferences, disproportionately relying on them to reconcile bicameral differences on salient measures. Majority parties, however, refrain from going to conference in those assemblies that empower the minority party to select its preferred conferees. The interaction of chamber rules and partisan dynamics thus shapes the contours of legislative agreements in systematic ways across the states.

To constrain legislative taxing power, 16 U.S. state constitutions require a supermajority in both chambers to increase or impose taxes. Both supporters and opponents of the requirement argue that its effect fades away because states circumvent it in various ways, especially by raising fees that are not subject to the requirement. Existing literature, however, offers little and inconsistent evidence on whether the effect decays over time and whether the decay results from fee hikes. This article documents legal cases to show the ways in which states have responded to the requirement, estimates whether the effects of the requirement decay over time, and tests whether states raise fees instead of taxes after adopting such a requirement. Using state-level panel data, I find that the initial effectiveness of the requirement on tax burden does decay approximately a decade after enactment and that the decay is not the result of fee increases.

Political scientists have increasingly viewed party activists as important catalysts for party behavior and change in American politics. Understanding the decisionmaking norms of these activists should help inform scholars' broader understanding of party performance. We examine the norms of party decisionmaking expressed by a select group of party activists: delegates to both parties' 2000 national conventions. We focus on how state contextual factors shape the norms these activists hold regarding the proper balance between ideological purity and the pragmatic pursuit of electoral success. The contextual factors we consider include the rules for delegate selection, the financial capacity of state parties, electoral competitiveness between the two parties, party polarization, and state political culture. We find evidence that norms respond as expected to some elements of state party context, but not to others.

Previous tests of theories of legislative committee development have relied on floor behavior and votes, data which is one step removed from committee behavior itself. I test these prominent theories of committees by looking directly at legislative behavior in committee. I examine the patterns of committee votes in the 2000-01 sessions of the California Legislature to assess the distributive, informational, and partisan theories of committee development. I find some support for all three theories, leading me to conclude that committee behavior varies across time and issue.

This note examines two modeling alterations of Barabas and Jerit's (2004) analysis of the influence of redistricting principles on minority representation in congressional districts. The size of states and the fact that some states cannot have majority-minority or minority-influence districts is taken into account in these new analyses. Overall, even with these two important alterations, Barabas and Jerit's findings are largely replicated. However, two of their most prominently reported findings—that a compactness requirement for redistricting is associated with both fewer majority-minority and minority-influence districts—are not corroborated.

Building upon existing theories of political fundraising and citizen participation in elections, this study examines contributions from individuals as an essential form of political participation in state high court elections from 2000 through 2012. Specifically, I explore the degree to which candidate characteristics, state political environments, and the attributes of state institutions affect the size of individual contributions. The findings of this investigation indicate the participation of contributors in judicial elections closely resembles the activities of voters. Like voters, contributors respond to contextual forces that increase or decrease salience and the political information available to state citizens. Of particular importance are state decisions to use partisan or nonpartisan election designs. Decisions by states to use partisan elections have important consequences for the generosity of contributors with larger donations directed to candidates seeking office in the most professionalized elective state supreme courts.

Voters in nearly half the states adopted term limits between 1990 and 2000, and recent efforts to repeal or extend these caps generally have suffered sound defeats. Past research demonstrates that while robust majorities approved of limiting the terms of elected officials, support was strongest among government cynics and minority-party identifiers. Here, we investigate the impact of trust and partisanship on attitudes toward a 2004 Arkansas proposal to extend term limits; we further test our findings using survey data on a related 2002 measure in California. Relying on statewide samples of likely voters, we find that Democrats and those with more trust in government demonstrate greater support for such measures than Republicans and cynics, controlling for other factors. Trust exerts the strongest substantive effect.

I estimate the impact of Nebraska's 1937 switch from a bicameral to a unicameral legislature on state-level government expenditures. Using the synthetic control method I create a counterfactual Nebraska from a weighted average of other potential control states and compare spending in this “synthetic Nebraska” to spending in the real Nebraska. Relative to the synthetic control, Nebraska experiences a sharp decrease in expenditures per capita immediately following the switch to a unicameral legislature; however, the difference appears to diminish over time. Placebo tests show that if the change in Nebraska's legislative structure were randomly assigned among the sample of states, and legislative structure had no real impact on spending, the likelihood of obtaining a treatment-effect estimate as large as Nebraska's would be 0.0213. While the initial drop in expenditures per capita lends support to the theory that bicameralism, by requiring more veto players, is associated with higher levels of government spending, the fact that the difference between Nebraska and synthetic Nebraska diminishes suggests that legislators are able to circumvent this constraint.

I argue that the value of a particular set of committee assignments for a legislator is dependent on that legislator's policy interests. By this, I mean that “good” assignments will match committee policy jurisdictions with member policy priorities. I develop this concept of committee-agenda matching and present a measure of this match for legislators in 12 state lower chambers. After some brief measure validation, I present a substantive application, demonstrating that this match poses serious consequences for individual legislator's ability to shepherd their bills through the legislative process.

State policies shape firms’ incentives to lobby in the United States, but the existing lobbying literature mostly ignores these incentives. Using lobbying records for all electric utilities in the United States from 1998 to 2012, we examine how state policies affect federal lobbying by both proponents and opponents of federal support for the renewable energy policy. Our theory predicts that supportive state policies reduce the returns to lobbying by both proponents and opponents. Empirically, we show that when the federal production tax credit for renewable energy is about to expire, electric utilities from states without renewable portfolio standards become more likely to lobby than those from states with these policies. Because the timing of the expiration of the production tax credit is quasi-random, these findings carry a causal interpretation. Using text analysis techniques, we also show that the lobbying efforts are focused on energy and environmental issues while lobbying on unrelated topics remains unaffected.

While a large body of research exists regarding the role of industry money on roll-call voting in the U.S. Congress, there is surprisingly little scholarship pertaining to industry influence on state politics. This study fills this void in an analysis of campaign donations and voting during passage of Act 13 in Pennsylvania during 2011 and 2012. After collecting information about natural gas production in state legislative districts, we estimate a series of multivariate models aimed at uncovering whether campaign donations contributed to a more favorable policy outcome for industry. Our findings indicate that campaign donations played a small but systematic role in consideration of the controversial legislation, which represented one of the first and most important state-level regulatory reforms for the hydraulic fracturing industry.

In the summer 2006 edition of State Politics and Policy Quarterly, Michael Baranowski and Donald Gross examined two methods of measuring influence over state agency activities: freestanding versus paired comparison. Their analysis led them to conclude that the paired-comparison measures might be theoretically superior, but are often impractical. Using the American State Administrator Project (ASAP) surveys, we supplement Baranowski and Gross's analysis by identifying conditions that sometimes make freestanding instruments superior measures and, at other times, paired comparisons both superior and practical to use.

As numerous pieces of past research have shown, the opinions of state residents significantly influence the politics and policies of the 50 U.S. states. This type of research flourished when aggregate-level indicators of overall state ideology and partisanship were devised from pooled national public opinion polls. This article provides an extension of such research by devising, from state surveys, aggregate-level measures of the ideological and partisan orientations of racial and ethnic minority voters, as well as that of white voters. These new data demonstrate that the opinions of African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans vary across the states, and in many cases, significantly alter the political orientations of a state's citizenry. These data will facilitate research that incorporates racial and ethnic diversity in the study of public opinion, U.S. state politics, and policy.

Recent scholarly work has discovered that modest changes in the framing of the titles and summaries of ballot measures can have dramatic effects on voter approval. This work expands upon these findings by exploring the effect of language specificity on support for ballot propositions that require the voter to pay for the measure with tax dollars. Although extensive research has explored ballot measure language complexity (e.g., position on the ballot, electoral effects, and prepossessed knowledge have all been shown to play a role in the outcome for propositions), left unanswered is the role of detailed language in altering support. Utilizing original experimental data, this work explores the framing effects of increasing specificity of proposed use of tax expenditures on support for ballot questions. Ultimately, this research finds that propositions providing more information to voters substantially increases the likelihood of support for those measures. Moreover, this increased specificity also bolsters certainty as to how the money will be spent, and intensifies how strongly voters feel about the issues being considered.

State governments are tasked with making important policy decisions in the United States. How do state legislators use their public communications—particularly social media—to engage with policy debates? Due to previous data limitations, we lack systematic information about whether and how state legislators publicly discuss policy and how this behavior varies across contexts. Using Twitter data and state-of-the-art topic modeling techniques, we introduce a method to study state legislator policy priorities and apply the method to 15 US states in 2018. We show that we are able to accurately capture the policy issues discussed by state legislators with substantially more accuracy than existing methods. We then present initial findings that validate the method and speak to debates in the literature. The paper concludes by discussing promising avenues for future state politics research using this new approach.

Political scientists and policy scholars have traditionally looked at the role of welfare and tax policies in shaping income inequality. Less attention has been paid to the key policy area of economic development. But states spend billions on economic development incentives each year to encourage firms to locate in their state. The few studies that have examined the impact of economic development policy on inequality have found mixed results, and have not considered who shapes and benefits from economic development policy when identifying possible causal mechanisms. I argue that increased incentive spending leads to increased inequality through either a market conditioning effect (incentives disproportionately boost the incomes of top earners prior to taxes) or a redistributive effect (incentives allow wealthy firms, investors, and employees to keep income that would otherwise be taxed and transferred). These mechanisms are tested using data on incentive spending and inequality across the 50 states from 1999 to 2014. The findings demonstrate that incentives increase income inequality via a redistributive effect only. This effect, though, is relatively large, long-lasting, and robust to different measures of incentive spending. Despite using economic development incentives to try to generate greater prosperity, state governments may be inadvertently exacerbating inequality.

One of the most important career decisions for a legislator is the decision to switch parties, and it raises a theoretical puzzle: it carries significant risk, yet sometimes legislators do change partisan affiliation. We elucidate this puzzle with the first-ever systematic comparison of the entire careers of state legislative switchers and non-switchers in the American South, where the high prevalence of party switching coincided with rapid realignment toward the Republican Party. Our analysis is the first to evaluate all post-switch career decisions (retiring, running for reelection, running for higher office) simultaneously, and it is the broadest in its scope with two full decades of career data. We demonstrate that converts to the Grand Old Party (GOP) pay a reelection cost. However, they are less likely to retire than Democratic non-switchers and more likely to seek higher office. This latter finding is especially strong during the earlier part of our study—when the Republican bench in the South was not as deep and competition for the party label was not as intense. Our findings suggest that political ambition motivates legislators to trade short-term electoral costs for a more promising long-term electoral career with the ascendant party.

The impact of U.S. Supreme Court decisions is contingent on the willingness of other political actors to implement those decisions. One important group of implementers is the U.S. state legislatures. However, in the pursuit of policy, state legislators must consider multiple goals when choosing among alternative policy options. In addition to considering the likelihood of review by state high courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, state legislators have their own ideas about good policy and must also face reelection. When are legislators likely to follow precedent and when are they likely to ignore it in pursuit of these other goals? In this article, I examine the enactment of state minimum wage legislation for women in the first half of the twentieth century. The results show that even after controlling for legislative and constituent preferences, legislators heed the preferences of the U.S. Supreme Court—but not necessarily their own high courts—when deciding to pass minimum wage legislation. The results point to the need for scholars of state politics to pay greater attention to the role of judicial actors when studying policy adoption and legislative behavior.

When the U.S. Supreme Court exercises its power of judicial review over state laws, its decisions, like the legislation it considers, frequently speak to major policy debates. Despite the Court's routine involvement with state statutes, theoretical explanations of judicial review generally do not distinguish between state laws and federal laws. The characteristics of state legislatures lead legislators in different states to have distinct perspectives and incentives, and ultimately affect the types of laws enacted in different states. We suggest that because the level of professionalism of state legislatures affects the types of laws pursued by different states, it may also affect the likelihood that a state has a law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. We find support for this expectation. Specifically, legislative professionalism is associated with an increased likelihood that a state has a law invalidated by the Court. This new evidence indicates that it is important to consider the legislative context in which state laws originate when examining the Court's review of state laws.