Interest group scholars have long emphasized the importance of group alliances in the policymaking process. But little is known about how groups choose specific alliance partners; that is, who works with whom? Social embeddedness theory suggests that the social location of groups in issue networks affects the information available to them about potential partners and the desirability of particular alliances. To test this hypothesis, I use data from interviews with representatives of 57 interest groups and 46 other significant political actors involved in Wisconsin's 1993-99 welfare policy debate to model alliance formation with two-stage conditional maximum likelihood regression (2SCML). I find substantial support for my social embeddedness hypotheses that alliance formation is encouraged by previous network interaction, contact with mutual third parties, and having a central position in a network. In short, the placement of groups in networks serves to facilitate alliances among some pairs of groups and to cut off potential connections among others.

Scholars have long been fascinated with how rearranging voters into districts affects the power of political parties, the careers of incumbents, and the representation of minorities. In this special issue, “Electoral Redistricting,” State Politics and Policy Quarterly brings together articles that touch on the three subfields of redistricting research: redistricting to advance the interests of partisans, incumbents, and racial groups. SPPQ is an excellent venue for these articles. The states are largely granted congressional redistricting authority in Article I, Section 4 of the United States Constitution, and they have the responsibility for determining their own sub-state electoral districts. And comparative state analysis provides an excellent research design to study the general impacts of political geography, redistricting institutions, and redistricting criteria.

In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, which banned the use of affirmative action in state hiring, contracting, and public university admissions. We know that white voters favored Proposition 209 more than nonwhite voters—the question is, why? Did they feel that the racial preferences given to growing numbers of members of racial and ethnic groups threatened them economically, or were they just motivated by old-fashioned racism? We test these two possible explanations—economic anxiety and racial division—for the appeal of Proposition 209 to California voters using exit poll data. We find little support for the economic anxiety explanation. Instead, racial division seems to be the best way to understand white voting on Proposition 209.

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.

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.

Two of the most notable changes in political interest communities in recent decades have been the rise of direct lobbying by institutions and the decline of collective lobbying via associations. These trends may be related to each other, since institutions can choose to lobby through either or both approaches. The shifting balance between direct and collective representation of institutional interests may signal important changes in how institutions perceive their interests, how those interests are pursued, and how diverse interests are aggregated in public policy. We present four theoretical perspectives—the demographic opportunity, collective action, competitive exclusion, and crowded room perspectives—to develop hypotheses about the relationship between these two forms of representation. We then employ both aggregate data on state lobby registrations and survey data on state lobbying by institutions to distinguish between these hypotheses. We find strongest support for the crowded room perspective, such that the relationship between direct and collective forms of interest representation tends to be one of mutualism rather than competition.

Many conventional accounts of lobbying communities emphasize towering differences in political influence between for-profit and not-for-profit and public organizations and between institutions and membership groups or associations. A central cause of these differences in influence is said to be differences in the persistence of these types of groups in a lobbying system. We test this hypothesis by examining the short-term turnover of organized interests in state interest communities in the 1990s. While we find evidence of substantial year-to-year turnover in lobby registrations, we find little support for the conventional wisdom about the distribution of persistence among types of organizations. Contrary to expectations, institutions are markedly less persistent than membership groups and associations, and for-profit interests are no more persistent, on average, than not-for-profit interests.

Scholars have recently highlighted a critical, but previously neglected, facet of racially discriminatory public policies—such policies may be motivated by either economic or psychological forces. That is, racially discriminatory policy may be the result of self-interest and competition in the face of scarcity or prejudices and affects based on group identities. We test if these motivations were behind the passage of an important, openly discriminatory public policy: California's Alien Land Law of 1920. We find that neither motivation alone accounts for the initiative vote that passed this law; both played a role. Our analysis also illustrates how racially discriminatory policies in the early 20th century fit into the ordinary politics of the day.

What is the role of political parties in the development of legislative institutions? Recent studies have explored the expansion and contraction of minority party procedural rights in the United States Congress (Binder 1997; Dion 1997), but these studies reach contradictory conclusions. Binder, emphasizing reciprocity norms, argues that minority party procedural rights expand as the majority party loses strength, while Dion, emphasizing the notion that small majorities are cohesive, asserts that these rights contract under these conditions. I apply Binder's and Dion's arguments to state legislative lower houses and test them with a dataset of 336 state legislative sessions in 23 states. The relevant variation among state legislatures provides the leverage necessary to understand better the relationship between partisan politics and legislative rule adoption more generally. I conclude that in state legislatures, minority party procedural rights expand as the minority party shrinks in size.

Does the racial and ethnic diversity of the area in which a voter lives affect his or her political behavior? Scholars have suggested a range of such effects, but these conclusions have questionable generalizability because the behavior they typically examine is racially charged. In this article, I test more general affects of racial and ethnic context by examining political behavior on a range of issues, both racially relevant and racially neutral. Specifically, I examine the impact of the racial and ethnic context on individual-level voting by whites in initiative elections. Merging 1996 and 1998 Voter News Service state exit poll survey data and United States Census Bureau contextual data, I find that there is a distinct relationship between racial and ethnic diversity and white voting behavior on racially relevant ballot initiatives, but that racial diversity does not have a consistent impact on voting on race-neutral initiatives.

How do term limits affect the electoral changes caused by state legislative redistricting? To answer this question, we compare the success of majority parties in the redistricting process in legislatures with and without term limits. We hypothesize that majority parties use the districts of term-limited members to redistribute supporters from safe districts to more competitive ones. We find that, indeed, the majority party changes district lines more in districts with term-limited legislators. Furthermore, the majority party is more strategic in reallocating voters for partisan gain in term-limited districts. Thus, our findings suggest that term limits make the redistricting process more partisan and that a reform intended to remove incumbents from the legislature actually strengthens the majority party.

I re-examine theories of legislative committee organization by using simulation to assess how representative state legislative committees are of their parent bodies. I find that clearly unrepresentative committees are rare and concentrated in a few chambers. I also find that comparing committee and chamber medians leads to very different conclusions about representativeness than does comparing means. My findings tend to confirm the informational model of committees and disconfirm the partisan model, but they cannot directly address the distributive model.

This study assesses the impact of campaign effort and election reform on voter turnout in state legislative elections. It uses a nationwide survey of state legislative candidates to measure various campaign activities and combines this information with data on election laws, political conditions, and district-level demographics. The primary finding is that candidate expenditures, party get-out-the-vote efforts, and Election Day registration laws have a synergistic effect on turnout. Campaign efforts heighten citizen interest in politics close to the election, often after registration deadlines have passed. Unlike other election reforms, Election Day registration allows citizens' late-campaign interest to be translated into increased voter turnout.

The literature on women in state legislatures has grown dramatically over the last few decades, examining in detail their personal characteristics, behavior, and the impact they have had on state legislatures. Highlighted throughout this body of work are the many ways in which these female officials differ from their male colleagues. While it may once have been necessary to identify and categorize women legislators, we now need to broaden our research to examine both the diversity among women state legislators and the contexts in which they may or may not make a difference. This broader focus should include analyses of state-level forces, such as legislative professionalism and state political culture, and it should also investigate more thoroughly policy outcomes and processes. Interactions between gender and other social forces, such as race, ethnicity, and class, should also be explored in greater depth. This new direction would build on the richness of the existing literature and allow the two fields of women in politics and state politics to better inform and contribute to each other.

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.

The national government can force or entice state governments to act on policy through a variety of actions, including providing monetary incentives and sanctions. We examine how and under what conditions actions of the national government influence the diffusion of policy across the states. We test our hypotheses on the cases of the diffusion of partial birth abortion laws, truth-in-sentencing laws, and hate crime laws using event history analysis on pooled cross-sectional data from the 50 states. Our results suggest that, in addition to fiscal incentives, the national government can influence state policymaking when it sends strong, clear signals to the states concerning its preferences and the potential for future action. But even national-level signals that are weak and ambiguous may influence state policymaking indirectly.

I present a measure of legislative professionalism for 41 states based on the degree to which legislators hold outside careers while in office. Higher salaries and longer sessions alter the incentives and opportunities for legislators to maintain outside careers. Consequently, outside career activity provides a behavioral indicator of professionalism to supplement existing measures based solely on institutional characteristics. I use financial disclosure reports to assess outside interests. Aggregated to the state level, my indicator is highly correlated with institutional measures of professionalism; at the individual level, it varies by sex and age. These findings support hypotheses that outside career choices are influenced by labor market participation and the financial opportunity costs of legislative service.

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.

Discrete event history analysis (EHA) is the analytic tool of choice for many scholars of policy diffusion across American states. Unfortunately, the policy diffusion literature largely ignores several important specification issues for EHA models: duration dependence, choice of functional form, and the computation of standard errors corrected for temporal and spatial dependence. We use data from Berry and Berry's (1990) seminal study of state lottery diffusion to demonstrate ways to deal properly with these issues.

Numerous studies attempt to assess direct democracy's impact on state policy using measures of direct democracy based on dummy variables or the frequency with which initiatives appear on a state's ballots. We offer an alternative to these measures that accounts for how rules governing the initiative process vary among the states. We replicate several studies using different measures of direct democracy and demonstrate that the results of hypothesis tests can be contingent on how these institutions are measured. We contend that commonly used dummy variable measures of state direct democracy have validity problems and that hypothesis tests using such measures produce imprecise estimates of the initiative's effect on policy.