By measuring U.S. term limits dichotomously, investigators ignore the vast differences among laws limiting state legislative service. Furthermore, this measurement problem increases the risk of false negatives and confounds the effects of term limits with those of the citizen initiative. To address this, I propose two sets of continuous measures of term-limitedness. The first set compares mandated turnover after term limits to turnover in the 1980s, the decade before term limits began sweeping elected officials from office. A second set adjusts the first set to reflect the potential for legislators to cycle repeatedly between legislative chambers when only their consecutive years of service are limited. These continuous measures outperformed a dichotomous designation of term limits in two tests, suggesting that the proposed measures can reduce the risk of false negatives about term limits in U.S. multi-state research and that they are more robust in the face of confounding effects from the citizen initiative.

By truncating service, term limits create massive turnover in some state legislatures where they exist, bringing flocks of newcomers into office. With less time to get to know each other and to develop expertise and influence, how do legislators know who to consult and whose advice to rely on? We explore this and other questions about three relationships (influence, friendship, and policy consultation) with a longitudinal study of the Michigan House of Representatives, a highly professionalized body with stringent limits on legislative terms. We found that term limits lead to a more pronounced regional component of friendship, greater concentration of influence among caucus leaders, consulting networks with more prominent hubs that could control the flow of information, and a decline in relationships across party lines. We argue that these effects of term limits bode poorly for bipartisan negotiation and consensus-building among legislators representing diverse constituencies.

A persistent question in the literature on policy adoption and diffusion focuses on the ways in which jurisdictions gather policy information. Decades of research have offered numerous conclusions regarding knowledge transfer mechanisms assumed to drive diffusion. While important, we suggest that the characteristics of existing work may have limited what we know about the exchange of policy information among peers. Most studies infer learning indirectly, and as a result, the literature has tended to focus on exchange between geographic and ideological peers, to the exclusion of other channels. As an alternative, this study takes a more direct approach and draws on a survey of 112 U.S. expert informants in the area of energy policy. We use the information exchange channels revealed by these informants to predict the diffusion of state renewable portfolio standards and electricity deregulation among the American states to determine whether they offer explanatory leverage beyond the “traditional” channels.

How do members of Congress anticipate and prepare for redistricting? I present data from the 1992 redistricting cycle that indicate that one reason why we rarely see changes in representation after redistricting is that incumbents change both their legislative activities and their campaigning prior to the first post-redistricting election. To examine incumbents' behavioral anticipation of redistricting in more detail, I also present a case study of incumbents' activities prior to the 1998 court-ordered congressional redistricting in North Carolina. I find that these incumbents participated actively in the redistricting process and made behavioral adjustments before they began to represent their new districts officially. These types of adjustments were often subtle, including changes in casework, local projects, and the allocation of staff and campaign resources.

We consider the impact of direct democracy on state public policy by examining whether initiatives alter the effects of predictors in models of general state policy liberalism. These analyses are couched in Erikson, Wright, and McIver's (1993) opinion liberalism model of state public policy, as augmented by Gray et al.'s (2004) inclusion of measures of organized interests. After presenting our theoretical expectations, we test the different ways that public opinion, organized interests, and initiatives can interact in the determination of public policy with a variety of models. We find little evidence that initiatives alter the congruence between opinion and policy.

Over the past two decades, campaigns for judicial elections in the U.S. states have become larger in scale. We analyze the impact of this development on voters' choices between candidates. Using a series of post-election surveys of voters in fourteen contests for the Ohio Supreme Court over twenty years, we probe the relationship between the amount of media coverage and campaign spending in a contest and the level of partisan voting. We find that in a state in which candidates' party affiliations are not listed on the ballot, high-visibility contests for judgeships produce more partisan voting than do lower-visibility contests. That effect was more pronounced for voters with greater political knowledge. These findings indicate that, at least in one state setting, high-visibility judicial contests have the effect of making more voters aware of basic information about the candidates, and that information informs their voting choices.

In this study we examine black voting in the 2008 presidential election. Recognizing the significance of having an African American win the presidency, we evaluate black political attitudes in 2008 vis-à-vis 2004, place black turnout in historical context, and discuss the problem of vote overreporting. The issue of vote overreporting plagues surveys, and this is particularly notable among African American respondents. The momentousness of Barack Obama's candidacy and subsequent election may further complicate black turnout responses. On the one hand, an African American Democratic presidential nominee is expected to mobilize blacks, but on the other hand this situation is also expected to increase the social desirability to misreport voting. To get around this intractable problem with surveys, we evaluate validated black turnout in the state of Georgia, which provides individual-level data on the population of registered voters. The validated black turnout numbers are much lower than those reported in national studies like the Current Population Survey, but our analysis indicates that compared to 2004, African American registration and voting in Georgia were markedly higher in 2008.

A comparative approach to studying the spread of policy innovations has recently yielded new and interesting results, as well as theoretical advancements, for policy diffusion research. Specifically, punctuated equilibrium theory has been offered as an explanation for why some policies spread quickly, while others do so normally, and still others are adopted very slowly. Studies of adoption speed, however, currently rely on careful case selection or a dichotomous categorization of adoptions as fast or slow to test why policies diffuse at different speeds. Building on this foundational work, I propose a method for measuring adoption speed as a continuous concept, so that it can be modeled directly as an important outcome of interest to diffusion scholars. I then use the new measure to evaluate how adoption speed varies across time and policy domain. I further demonstrate the utility of the measure as a dependent variable by replicating past results, including the interactive effect of complexity and salience on adoption speed and positive effect of federal incentives, as well as finding preliminary evidence that policy clusters spread more rapidly than the average stand-alone policy.

Pooled event history analysis (PEHA) allows researchers to study the effects of variables across multiple policies by stacking the data and estimating the parameters in a single model. Yet this approach to modeling policy diffusion implies assumptions about homogeneity that are often violated in reality, such that the effect of a given variable is constant across policies. We relax this assumption and use Monte Carlo simulations to compare common strategies for modeling heterogeneity, testing these strategies with increasing levels of variance. We find that multilevel models with random coefficients produce the best estimates and are a significant improvement over other models. In addition, we show how modeling similar policies as multilevel structures allows researchers to more precisely explore the theoretical implications of heterogeneity across policies. We provide an empirical example of these modeling approaches with a unique data set of 29 antiabortion policies.

Several recent studies have investigated the relationship between direct democracy and public policy outcomes, with mixed findings. These inconsistencies may stem, in part, from researchers' failure to recognize that direct democracy institutions are distributed nonrandomly across the American states. That is, certain factors may lead a state to adopt the initiative process and influence other policy choices. We revisit the question of how the initiative influences state fiscal policy using panel data from 1960-2000 and a full-information maximum likelihood estimator that explicitly accounts for the endogeneity of the initiative. Our findings suggest that failure to endogenize the initiative in empirical analyses leads to substantially biased estimates of its effects. In particular, we find that once factors that predict whether a state has adopted the initiative are controlled, the initiative has a positive effect on state revenue generation and spending.

The American states offer a wealth of variation across time and space to understand the sources, dynamics, and consequences of public policy. As laboratories of socioeconomic and political differences, they enable both wide-scale assessments of change and studies of specific policy choices. To leverage this potential, we constructed and integrated a database of thousands of state-year variables for designing and executing social research: the Correlates of State Policy Project (CSPP). The database offers one-stop shopping for accurate and reliable data, allows researchers to assess the generalizability of the relationships they uncover, enables assessment of causal inferences, and connects state politics researchers to larger research communities. We demonstrate CSPP’s use and breadth, as well as its limitations. Through an applied empirical approach familiar to the state politics literature, we show that researchers should remain attentive to regional variation in key variables and potential lack of within-state variation in independent and dependent variables of interest. By comparing commonly used model specifications, we demonstrate that results are highly sensitive to particular research design choices. Inferences drawn from state politics research largely depend on the nature of over time variation within and across states and the empirical leverage it may or may not provide.

In this article, I examine the environmental race-to-the-bottom argument by studying whether state susceptibility to interstate economic competition helps explain which U.S. states engage in environmental regulatory competition. Specifically, I create a susceptibility index using four state economic attributes: overall growth, unemployment, manufacturing growth, and manufacturing employment. Studying state enforcement of federal environmental programs, I find little evidence that states, which are theoretically more susceptible to interstate economic competition are more likely to respond strategically to the regulatory behavior of economic competitor states. These results cast doubt on the idea that the environmental regulatory competition predicted by race-to-the-bottom theory is mediated by intrastate economic conditions.

How do traditional redistricting principles—contiguity, communities of interest, political subdivisions, incumbent protection, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, preservation of district core, and compactness—affect racial minority representation in congressional districts? Using data from the 2001-02 redistricting process, we find that compactness is the only principle that significantly affects minority representation, both in terms of majority-minority districts and minority influence districts, but these effects are contingent on the size of the minority community and extent of racial segregation in a state. Two other principles, Section 5 pre-clearance and protecting political subdivisions, improve minority representation in a more limited way. Thus, race-neutral redistricting criteria like the compactness principle, can dramatically affect the racial composition of the resulting districts and, thereby, affect minority representation.

Most studies of the effects of term limits on state legislators' careers have focused solely on their propensity to seek other offices. An expected-utility analysis of the decision to run for office indicates that term limits reduce the benefits of seeking reelection, even for state legislators who are eligible to run, and reduce the opportunity cost of running for other offices. From this analysis, I develop a series of hypotheses about the probability that state legislators—term-limited or not—will seek re-election or other offices under a term limits regime, the value of the offices they seek, and the probability with which they will win these contests. I test these hypotheses using data on the career choices of state legislators in states with and without term limits in 2000-02. My empirical analysis supports the rational entry model and indicates that term limits have had a much richer effect on state legislative careers than previously understood.

Expansive and restrictive state electoral institutions have been instrumental in structuring the vote throughout American history. Studies focused on a small number of reforms, years, or states lack the scope necessary to comprehensively evaluate the effects of institutional change over time. This work, however, places recent reforms in historical context and offers a long-term perspective. Using an original data set, it identifies the institutions that have generated the most substantial effects on state turnout rates during presidential elections from 1920 to 2000. Findings demonstrate that restrictive laws (those aiming to limit the vote or make voting more costly) produced large and consistently negative effects in the Southern and non-Southern states alike, but the effects associated with expansive reforms (those making participation more convenient or less costly) vary. Although a few expansive laws have increased turnout in the non-Southern states, they have had no effect in the Southern states where turnout rates are lowest.

Following the problems with presidential voting in Florida in 2000, voters and political scientists became interested in election administration. While empirical studies have shown that different election equipment can produce different tabulation error rates, little is known about the factors that affect voters' perceptions of good election administration. Using a survey of voters in Georgia, we examine these perceptions of the voting process. We find that black voters and Democrats were significantly less confident than others that their votes were counted accurately and that they were also more likely to express concerns over the election equipment they used. In contrast, the actual voting environment, including the type of voting equipment used, appears to have no direct bearing on voters' trust in the process.

Aggregate voter turnout rates in the United States have been used in many political science studies, as both a dependent and an independent variable. Most of these studies use the voting-age population as the denominator in their turnout rate measure. However, the voting-age population is not the same as the population of eligible voters. I demonstrate why this distinction matters and outline the steps to construct the voting-eligible population for each of the states from 1980–2000 to provide more accurate measures of state-level voter turnout rates.

The textbook image of the California electorate as unusually independent, moderate, antipartisan, and prone to ticket splitting is badly out of date. As in Washington, DC, increased partisan polarization in California's state government reflects increased partisan polarization in the electorate. This study shows that, compared to other American voters, Californians are stronger party identifiers, more loyal to their parties' candidates, less likely to split their tickets, and more extreme ideologically. Moreover, the California electorate, like the national electorate, has become increasingly partisan, loyal, consistent, and prone to ideological extremity since the 1970s. These developments, combined with legislative district lines that have given the parties more politically distinct constituencies, have echoed and reinforced the increasingly polarized partisan divisions in California state government, just as they have at the national level.

Can a school curriculum influence the political socialization of students? And if so, can such socialization “trickle up” to influence the political socialization of these students' parents? We examine the effects of Kids Voting USA in Kansas to answer these questions. By the 1996 presidential election, Kids Voting was implemented in several Kansas counties. Consequently, we are able to compare turnout—and change in turnout across different elections—in such counties with those that did not adopt the program. After controlling for a variety of county-level characteristics that are likely to affect turnout, regression analyses indicate a positive and significant contribution of Kids Voting to county turnout, and change in turnout across elections. We address the practical implications of this study and emphasize its theoretical contribution to theories of political socialization.

Much of the academic literature that examines U.S. state tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) concludes that TELs are an ineffective mechanism for limiting state spending. However, one shortcoming common to all of these studies is their failure to take into account the incentives of the political actors who enact these TELs. I hypothesize that because of differences in incentives, TELs enacted by citizen initiatives will be more stringent and more effective than TELs passed by state legislatures. An examination of the provisions of the various TELs and a regression analysis support this hypothesis.