If voters had the opportunity to choose the characteristics of their representative institutions directly, how would they do so? Voters in several states selected the base of their state legislative apportionment through the initiative process prior to the reapportionment revolution of the 1960s, which provides a unique opportunity to answer this question. This study examines 13 such initiatives in four states between 1924 and 1962. Four factors are hypothesized to influence vote choice on these initiatives: urban-rural conflict, partisanship, race, and economic self-interest. Through regression analysis of the county-level vote in these elections I find that economic self-interest consistently influences voter support for apportionment initiatives while these other factors influence it only occasionally. This finding suggests that distributive politics drive voters' evaluation of representative institutions and that the influence of other political factors depends on the historical and local context of an initiative.

Democratic accountability relies on voters to punish their representatives for policies they dislike. Yet, a separation-of-powers system can make it hard to know who is to blame, and partisan biases further distort voters’ evaluations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, precautionary policies were put into place sometimes by governors, sometimes by mayors, and sometimes by no one at all, allowing us to identify when voters hold out-party versus in-party politicians responsible for policies. With a survey spanning 48 states, we test our theory that attitudes toward policies and parties intersect to determine when selective attribution takes place. We find that as individuals increasingly oppose a policy, they are more likely to blame whichever level of government is led by the out-party. This is most pronounced among partisans with strong in-party biases. We provide important insight into the mechanisms that drive selective attribution and the conditions under which democratic accountability is at risk.

In recent years, scholars of applied public policy have published a growing number of studies regarding state tobacco policymaking. This article analyzes the research findings, data sources, and methodological approaches of this applied and theoretical policy research, including numerous comprehensive state tobacco policymaking studies analyzing issues such as youth access enforcement, tobacco taxes, anti-tobacco education efforts, and clean indoor air programs. Other studies have focused on individual policymaking instruments designed to address state tobacco control issues, including tort reform, tobacco listed as a cause of death on death certificates, tobacco sampling, promotion and advertising restrictions, and fire-safe cigarettes. This wealth of research into tobacco policymaking has contributed significantly to our understanding of federalism, policy diffusion, and iron triangles and issue networks.

In Illinois and Texas, senate elections return members to serve terms of different length. Because term length schedules are randomized, these states provide a natural experiment. Cross-sectional comparison of chambers requires statistical controls for myriad factors that distinguish cases (chambers or periods). These two chambers, by contrast, produce direct evidence of term length's impact on electoral behavior. We test hypotheses about term length's impact on candidacies, campaign expenditures, and voter participation with data from 1968 to 2010. Surprisingly, there is little evidence of any significant differences between contests for two-year and four-year terms.

Voters often have difficulty making choices on the myriad state constitutional amendments they vote on each year. Without partisan cues, they turn to other sources for these low-salience, high complexity measures. One such source is newspaper endorsements. In this article, we look at newspaper endorsements of ballot measures in Florida over 20 years both on “no” votes and roll-off. We argue that endorsements' effect on “no” votes and roll-off differs in ways not previously appreciated. Newspaper endorsements have a positive impact on no votes, as expected from the information theory of voter participation. Endorsements have little impact on roll-off, which we posit is because roll-off voters are not likely to seek information from newspapers. Thus, newspaper endorsements serve to persuade, but not entice, voters to vote for ballot measures.

Conventional wisdom holds that public campaign financing can diversify the socioeconomic makeup of candidate pools and, therefore, of U.S. elected officials, which could make U.S. public policy more responsive to lower socioeconomic status (SES) citizens. I argue that in addition to the absence of a positive relationship between public financing and candidate socioeconomic diversity, public financing, depending on the program design, may, in fact, reduce candidate socioeconomic diversity. Using occupational data on state legislative candidates in public financing state Connecticut and two paired control states to execute a difference in difference analysis, I demonstrate that when public financing is available, fewer low SES candidates run for state legislative office, and those who do run are not more likely to win and are less likely to utilize public financing.

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Scholarly research finds that partisan, hard-fought, expensive, and churlish state supreme court campaigns increase voter participation and their support for challenger candidates. These insights, however, are drawn nearly exclusively from competitive state supreme court elections. Little is known about voter behavior in uncompetitive retention elections. Traditionally, these races are not salient to the public given that incumbents raise and spend little-to-no money, and campaigns, parties, and political action committees air few (if any) advertisements. Since 2010, however, such behavior has become more commonplace. I assess voter participation and incumbent performance in 178 state supreme court retention elections from 2002 to 2014. I find that expensive, churlish retention elections are likely to increase voter turnout and to hurt incumbents' efforts to win retention.

During the most recent round of redistricting, many states have enacted a number of reforms to their mapmaking practices. One reform that has received increased attention in recent years is a ban on prison gerrymandering—the practice of counting incarcerated individuals in prisons instead of their home addresses. Eleven states drew districts while counting incarcerated persons in their homes after the 2020 Census. Though substantial research has investigated redistricting practices, far less attention has been paid to empirically examining the effect of prison gerrymandering on elections. We seek to fill this void by evaluating the effect of New York’s ban on prison gerrymandering on state legislative elections between 2002 and 2020. We find that altering how the prison population is counted, indeed, altered the electoral dynamics across the state.

Scholars of comparative constitution-making and direct democracy agree that economic conditions affect public support for constitutional reform but disagree as to how. Prospect theory suggests both approaches may be correct, depending on the political and economic context in which voters operate. Fourteen states periodically ask their citizens whether to call a state constitutional convention, making this the oldest form of direct democracy in the United States. We test our theory in preelection polls in two of these states and a survey experiment. According to the results, negative perceptions of economic and government performance increase support for conventions when voters view them as opportunities to correct problems. On the other hand, if a convention represents a chance to improve on an acceptable status quo, voters with positive performance evaluations become more supportive. Our findings contribute to the heuristics literature and inform normative debates over direct democracy and popular constitutionalism.

The current version of the Squire state court of last resort professionalization index is regularly used in studies of state courts. We have updated the index for 2019, producing a second and more recent index. Given the relative stability between this index and its predecessor, it is unlikely that many findings will change. During the 15 years that lapsed between the first index and the more recent one, little changed in most states, while reforms in a few places substantially shifted the relative standing of their court of last resort. It seems unlikely that the nation will experience any sweeping reform movements impacting state courts of last resort across the board. The more likely scenario is the sort of idiosyncratic changes impacting a few courts that were witnessed over the last decade and a half. Thus, looking to the future, it may be prudent to update the index every 5–10 years to capture any notable alterations.

This study examines how state government responses to economic crisis, in the form of unexpected changes in state fiscal policy, influence income inequality. State governments are vital actors in times of fiscal stress as nearly every state must make difficult policy decisions related to taxes and spending to address budget deficits, both of which are policies that shape the income gap. Focusing on periods of fiscal stress is important for the study of state inequality as those with fewer resources are the most likely to experience the consequences of their state’s fiscal response during these times. Using time-series cross-sectional data, this research demonstrates that income inequality increases when states respond to economic crisis by relying on unexpected spending cuts. These effects tend to persist even after initial economic downturns. In addition, one individual-level implication of the aggregate relationship between state policy responses and inequality—that people will be worse off financially when their states emphasize budget cuts in response to economic decline—is assessed using several post–Great Recession surveys. The findings have implications for the future of inequality in the United States and provide potential paths for state fiscal reform.

We examine how institutional selection procedures affect the ideology of state supreme court chief justices. We argue that institutional selection methods empower those charged with choosing chief justices to select court leaders who reflect their own preferences, and we test this theory using data from all 50 American states from 1970 to 2017. Our results show that states that use popular elections to select chief justices tend to produce court leaders whose preferences reflect the electorate, and states that use commission-assisted elite appointment tend to produce chief justices whose preferences mirror those of political elites. While we find that peer election systems produce leaders with preferences similar to median court preferences, court preferences are also associated with other methods of chief justice selection.

Term limits provide a rare opportunity to employ pre- and post-intervention research designs to investigate the effects of turnover in legislatures. This article describes a study of term limits in Michigan that takes advantage of this opportunity. With eight states implementing term limits in 2002 or soon thereafter, there are opportunities for other scholars to replicate all or parts of the study described here. The payoffs for such projects in terms of generating systematic answers to the impacts of legislative turnover and term limits are considerable.

Policy representation requires legislators to advance the interests of their constituents. As a consequence, much research on representation examines the congruence between constituents' preferences and legislators' behaviors. This article argues it is more realistic to think of policy representation as listening—a process—than congruence—an outcome. Listening involves legislators monitoring constituent interests and using that information in making decisions. Using data from a survey of state legislators in 26 states, this research finds that monitoring contributes to using constituent information and offers a measure of listening based on these two behaviors. Furthermore, it finds that compared with the decisions of others, the decisions (measured as cosponsoring gay, lesbian, and bisexual [GLB] issue legislation) of legislators who listen are more strongly influenced by district preferences (measured as district votes on same-sex marriage ballot initiatives). This suggests that listening contributes to representation.

We examine whether the geographic distribution of a political party's electoral support affects the divisiveness of statewide primaries. In spite of V.O. Key, Jr.'s (1956) original insight that geography might be a relevant predictor of contested statewide primaries, this hypothesis has received little attention from political scientists. We test Key's hypothesis using data on gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections to identify the effects of electoral geography on the structure of competition in primary elections. We contend that dispersed bases of electoral support greatly increase the costs associated with maintaining party cohesion. Our findings support the theory that a geographically dispersed electorate heightens the potential for intraparty factionalism. These results are robust across several measures of the dependent variable.

American state constitutions vary tremendously in their length, amendment rate, and age. These three variables—especially the first two—strongly influence the rate at which state supreme courts strike down state actions for violating the state constitution. Longer, more detailed constitutions reduce policy flexibility, increasing judicial invalidations; rarely updated constitutions may fail to address modern concerns, increasing invalidations; and recently adopted constitutions may contain fragile logrolls and similar shortcomings, also increasing invalidations. These findings add new considerations to a rich literature on judicial review in state supreme courts.

Why are statewide ballot initiatives used more frequently in some states relative to others? Using Gerber as a theoretical baseline, I argue that groups use initiatives in response to conditions surrounding representative government. Specifically, I argue that groups are best able to mobilize the resources necessary (i.e., citizens) to draft, qualify for the ballot, and pass an initiative when conditions surrounding representative government render it incapable of addressing citizens' policy preferences efficiently and effectively. Groups, that is, are best able to mobilize the resources necessary to pass initiatives as legislatures become insulated from citizens, or ineffective at digesting policy items. I extend the literature in this vein by finding strong evidence that initiatives are used in response to partisan conditions, which undermine legislatures' capacity to process legislation effectively. However, I find only limited empirical support for the argument that initiatives are used in response to legislative insulation.

A growing literature has revealed a notable electoral advantage for congressional and gubernatorial candidates with deep local roots in their home districts or states. However, there is a dearth of research on the presence and impact of local roots in state legislative races. In this paper, we close that gap by demonstrating the consistent and significant electoral impacts that state legislators’ local roots have on their reelection efforts. We use data capturing a representative cross-section of state legislative incumbents (N = ~5,000) and calculate a novel index measuring the depth of their local roots modeled after Hunt’s (2022, Home Field Advantage: Roots, Reelection, and Representation in the Modern Congress) measure for the US House. We present evidence that state legislators with deep local roots in the districts they represent run unopposed in their general elections nearly twice as often as incumbents with no such roots. Of those who do attract challengers in their reelection efforts, deeply rooted incumbents enjoy an average of three extra percentage points of vote share. Our results have important implications for candidate emergence in state legislative elections during a time when so many are uncontested. They also demonstrate the limits of electoral nationalization for understanding state politics.

Fiorina (1992, 1994) argued that increased professionalism of state legislatures in the 1970s and 1980s increased Democratic control of those bodies. While some subsequent empirical studies have been consistent with this hypothesis, doubt remains about the causal connection of this relationship. Our review of Fiorina's theoretical argument leads us to add legislative district size as a conditioning element to the model. Using data from state legislatures in 1960-98, we find that such a model supports the claim that the empirical connection between legislative professionalism and Democratic electoral success is causal and not spurious.