Legislative redistricting is among the most intensely fought battles in American politics. Through redistricting, political parties seek to control government, incumbents seek job security, and minority groups seek representation. I explore how the various United States redistricting institutions, and the political actors who operate within them, determined the outcomes of the 2001-02 redistricting cycle. I categorize these institutions into two types: redistricting that follows the normal legislative process and that which takes place through a commission. For those states that use the legislative process, when one party controls state government, redistricting results in a partisan gerrymander. When there is divided state government, a bipartisan compromise results from the legislative process. Commission systems differ on membership and voting rules, suggesting two types of commissions: partisan and bipartisan. A partisan commission reliably produces a partisan map, while a bipartisan commission results in a bipartisan compromise.

While the dynamics of trust in the national government have been shown to be responsive to political events and governmental performance, less is known about why the public's trust in U.S. state and local government rises and falls over time. We examine the trends in confidence in subnational government using an aggregate level approach. First, we consider whether levels of trust are defined by reactions to the national government. Second, we consider how factors specific to subnational politics such as governmental performance and the quality of community life influence trust. Using measures of confidence in state and local government from 1968 to 2004 and a set of error correction models, we find evidence for both accounts. Confidence in subnational governments reflects national trends such as economic tides and public preferences for more or less government, but also exhibits unique dynamics explained by factors specific to subnational politics.

This article introduces a new, public database of U.S. state and local public policies, now available at www.statepolicyindex.com. The database covers more than 170 different state or local policies, coded at the state level as of December 31, 2006, in most cases. We use principal components analysis and derive two orthogonal measures of state policy ideology, which we label policy liberalism and policy urbanism. Our policy liberalism measure passes several reliability and validity checks, while policy urbanism is strongly predicted by urbanization rate, percentage of African Americans in the population, and percentage of Christian adherents in the population.

We propose a model of public response to politicized election reform. In this model, rival partisan elites send signals on the need and consequences of a proposed reform, with partisans in public adopting those positions. We apply this to test how state use of voter identification laws corresponded with public evaluations of the conduct of a state's elections. We find that the relationship between photo identification laws and confidence in state elections was polarized and conditioned by party identification in 2014. Democrats in states with strict photo identification laws were less confident in their state's elections. Republicans in states with strict identification laws were more confident than others. Results suggest strict photo identification laws are failing to instill broad-based confidence in elections, and that the reform could correspond with diminished confidence among some.

Representation in political institutions, including the judiciary, is an important consideration for both political scientists and citizens. What factors systematically influence diversity among judges? In particular, does the method of selection affect the relative success of political minorities in attaining a seat on the bench? The answers to these questions have substantial normative and theoretical implications. We examine judges on all state supreme and intermediate appellate courts in 1985 and 1999 to assess the influence of various structural, political, and demographic factors on judicial diversity. We demonstrate that the ability of political minorities to attain a place in the judiciary is not solely a function of any single factor. Instead, their success is influenced by a multifaceted combination of factors contingent on time and the level of the court, and these influences differ for women and for minorities.

Internet surveys of the general population have been growing in use over the last few years because they are less expensive, faster, and greener than most other survey modes. However, they have been used less frequently to survey elites, and little is known about the representativeness of their results. This article helps fill that void by using an experiment where half of a sample of state legislators are given an Internet survey and half a mail survey, and then the response rate, representativeness of respondents, and similarity of responses are compared. The results indicate that mail and Internet surveys generate fairly representative samples, albeit with few biases, and similar responses; however, mail surveys generate a significantly higher response rate than Internet surveys. The implications of these findings are discussed.

How does minority racial and ethnic descriptive representation exert policy influence in majoritarian representative institutions? And how do nonrepresentative majoritarian institutions, such as the citizen initiative, affect the degree of this influence? I use an event history analysis of state adoption of English Only laws from 1984 to 2002 to test a model of minority policy influence that is exerted through the possession of state legislative leadership positions. Unlike previous studies, I find that the size of the minority population and the level of descriptive representation in the legislature exert only an indirect effect on legislative policy decisions. Furthermore, the majoritarian rules of the initiative undermine the policy influence minorities gain through legislative leadership and can actually lead to a policy backlash.

Elsewhere I have argued that measures of U.S. state legislative professionalization assess individual and organizational capacity to generate and evaluate information in the policymaking process. In this article, I adapt my measure of state legislative professionalization to state courts of last resort, attempting to assess the informational capacity of those bodies in making legal decisions. Specifically, I examine judicial salaries, a court's level of control over its docket, and the number of law clerks employed by the justices. After presenting four variants of the court professionalization measure and investigating their validity, I examine explanations for their observed variance across the states. I conclude by comparing my indices with existing indices and speculating about the utility of such measures.

Elementary and secondary education policy making in the U.S. states is heavily influenced by the political bargaining of various actors, with teacher unions one of the most important actors. Yet previous studies that assess the impact of teacher unions on education reform use problematic measures of their direct political influence, instead opting for broader measures of membership or collective bargaining power. By contrast, the authors measure teacher union political activity by calculating the percentage of campaign contributions to candidates for state office that come from teacher unions. Using this measure, the authors find that increased teacher union political activity greatly reduces the chances that states enact reform-oriented education policies such as school choice and performance pay for teachers, while previous measures of teacher union strength bear little relationship to a state's adoption of these reform policies. These findings highlight the importance of paying careful attention to how political influence is operationalized in studies that assess the role organized interests play in shaping U.S. state policies.

This article sheds new light on policy diffusion by exploring policy complexity in state-level lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) antidiscrimination policies. The multiple component event history approach taken in this research allows for the concurrent study of both policy content and the factors that affect policy adoption. Results reveal that the factors influencing policy adoption vary depending on both the content and scope of the policy in question. In addition to addressing laws that protect gay people from discrimination, this article is one of the first studies in the political science and policy literature to empirically investigate the spread of transgender-inclusive laws. Despite combined advocacy and public conflation of identities, gay and transgender-inclusive laws appear to be influenced by different internal and external factors.

Among the least-researched American elections are those for seats on the states' supreme courts, arguably some of the most important political positions in the states. We know not only that campaign spending in these races has increased sharply in the past 20 years but also that there is great variation in spending among them. What factors cause campaign spending to vary among races for the states' highest courts? And what can an understanding of campaign spending in these races tell us about campaign spending for other offices? I use data from 281 state supreme court races in 21 states from 1990 to 2000 to answer these questions. I find that state supreme court campaign spending is driven by the characteristics of the race, institutional arrangements, and the electoral and state supreme court context.

Studies of the diffusion of policies tend to focus on innovations that successfully spread across governments. Implicit in such diffusion is the abandonment of the previous policy. Yet little is known about whether governments abandon policies that have failed elsewhere, as would be consistent with states acting as policy laboratories not only for policy successes but also for failures. This article focuses on the possible abandonment of failing welfare-to-work policies in the formative years (1997–2002) of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program across the 50 U.S. states. Using a dyad-based event history analysis, I find that, if both states in a pairing have a policy and one state's policy fails (in employing welfare recipients, reducing welfare rolls, or reducing overall poverty rates), then the other state is much more likely to abandon that failing policy. Moreover, such learning from the other state's experience is more common when the states are ideologically similar to one another and when the legislature in the potentially learning state is more professional.

Does the thermostatic model exist in the states? Using a unique data set on state spending preferences on education and welfare, I find evidence of dynamic policy representation and dynamic public responsiveness, but with important qualifications. As state support for spending on education or welfare increases, state expenditures increase, but only for states that are highly professional and, presumably, able to accurately gauge the preferences of residents. In other states, legislators are responding to national policy sentiment instead of specific state opinion. I find no evidence that initiative states are more responsive to state opinion. Empirical evidence for dynamic public responsiveness is more consistent across model specifications. As state expenditures on education or welfare increase, state preferences for additional spending decrease, even after controlling for federal expenditures. Finally, I find that policy representation and public responsiveness in the states are conditional on issue saliency. The results provide a more nuanced understanding about the degree of dynamic representation and responsiveness in the states and the thermostatic model more generally.

We explore the effects of state-level election reforms on voter turnout in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections. Using a cost-benefit model of political participation, we develop a framework for analyzing the burdens imposed by the following: universal mail voting, permanent no-excuse absentee voting, nonpermanent no-excuse absentee voting, early in-person voting, Election Day registration, and voter identification requirements. We analyze turnout data from the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Current Population Surveys and show that implementation by states of both forms of no-excuse absentee voting and Election Day registration has a positive and significant affect on turnout in each election. We find positive but less consistent effects on turnout for universal mail voting and voter identification requirements. Our results also show that early in-person voting has a negative and statistically significant correlation with turnout in all three elections.

We modify Berry et al.‘s congressional-delegation-based measure of state government ideology to construct a new measure—which we call the state-legislative-based state government ideology measure—by relying on Shor and McCarty's National Political Awareness Test common space estimates of the ideal points of U.S. state legislators. We conduct tests of convergent and construct validity for the two measures. We find that they correlate highly in each year for which the state-legislative-based indicator is available (1995–2008), and when observations are pooled across all years. We also replicate numerous published studies assessing the impact of state government ideology using each indicator of ideology and find that the two measures nearly always yield similar conclusions about the effect of government ideology. Because the state-legislative-based measure is based on more direct estimates of the ideal points of state legislators than is the congressional-delegation-based measure—which uses estimates of ideal points for members of Congress from the same state as a proxy—we believe the state-legislative-based measure is superior, and we recommend that scholars use it when it is available for the state-years being studied. Because our empirical evidence indicates that Berry et al.‘s congressional-delegation-based measure is also valid—and it is available for a much longer period (annually beginning in 1960)—we advise that it be used when the state-legislative-based measure is not available.

Voter identification (ID) policies, especially those of the photo ID variety, have been hotly contested over the last few years. The primary concern surrounding these statutes amounts to lower turnout, especially among certain groups in the electorate, such as racial/ethnic minorities. In 2007, the way was cleared for Georgia to implement a new statute requiring registrants to present a government-issued photo ID to vote. Using population data on registrants from two election cycles coupled with information on a subgroup of registrants known to lack photo ID, we conduct a policy impact analysis of the Georgia voter ID law. We find that the new law did produce a suppression effect among those registrants lacking proper ID. Substantively, the law lowered turnout by about four-tenths of a percentage point in 2008. However, we find no empirical evidence to suggest that there is a racial or ethnic component to this suppression effect.

State-level research affords scholars a unique opportunity to study legislative behavior because state legislators are accessible in ways that members of congress are not. State legislators' willingness to respond to interviews and questionnaires has provided scholars with a rich array of data about their behavior and perceptions. This survey research has contributed greatly to our theoretical and practical knowledge of legislative behavior and institutions. We examine 73 articles published in top academic journals from 1975 to 2000 to identify common techniques of surveying state legislators and suggest ways in which scholars can enhance the prospects for collecting high quality data. We also consider what type of collective efforts could be undertaken to enhance this underutilized resource for studying legislative politics.

American state politics scholars have generally relied on Ranney's measure of the partisan composition of state legislatures and governors' offices to evaluate competition between parties for control of state government, and Holbrook and Van Dunk's measure of the competitiveness of individual state legislative elections to evaluate the degree of electoral competition in a state. Both measure “competition” and were previously correlated with one another, so researchers might be tempted to consider them two measures of the same concept. This would be mistaken, however, because they are measuring two distinct concepts. We use new data on state legislative partisan balance and election returns to compute (and make publicly available) the two measures of competition from 1970 to 2003, a time span that is significantly longer than any previous study. We show that the relationship between the two measures has drastically changed over the last 30 years. Although the two measures were positively correlated in the 1970s and 1980s, they are now (as we might expect, given they are different concepts) negatively correlated. We investigate one possible explanation for this change and conclude by discussing a set of practical recommendations for scholars who plan to incorporate a measure of competition in future studies.

This article examines differences in the drivers of state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Medicaid immigrant eligibility policies, determined in the wake of the 1996 Welfare Reform. The findings show that differences in the incentive structures of the two programs may affect the way race politics influence each. Specifically, race is a strong negative correlate for TANF inclusion of immigrants as states with large African American populations were more likely to exclude legal permanent residents from the program. In the case of Medicaid, the size of the immigrant population is a strong positive correlate for inclusion. The effect of the size of the black population, although negative, is small and not significant. The study confirms extant research findings that ideological factors play an important role in the formation of both policies.

Scholars have argued that legislatures can use administrative procedures to constrain bureaucratic discretion and maintain policy control when delegating authority. One such mechanism is the formal authority to review agency rule proposals. We find that legislatures with stronger formal authority to review rules ex ante are viewed by agency heads as more influential in their rulemaking decisions, but this power is mitigated when such review is checked by the governor. Our analysis demonstrates the impact of institutional arrangements on general state legislative influence over policy implementation. Understanding this element of legislative control over state bureaucracies helps explain variations in state-level policymaking.