Although the U.S. judiciary is designed to be an independent and counter-majoritarian arbiter of the law, many states feature electoral institutions that may expose judges to public pressure. Scholars have demonstrated that judicial elections provide a clear link between public opinion and judicial decision making that may undermine the ability of courts to act in counter-majoritarian ways to protect minority rights. We extend this line of inquiry by examining whether direct democracy institutions have a similar effect of enhancing the impact of public opinion on judicial behavior and reducing the likelihood of judges voting in favor of minority rights. Empirical results from an analysis of gay rights cases in the American states from 1981 to 2004 provide evidence that direct democracy, in conjunction with electoral retention methods, significantly increases the effect of public opinion on judicial decisions.

The opinion-writing process is a vital yet understudied aspect of judicial decision making on state supreme courts. We argue that this process is influenced by the political context and particularly by institutional rules that serve to reactivate and reinforce divisions among justices, leading to less cooperation on the court. We test our theory with original data comprising all education cases decided from 1995 to 2005 in all 50 states and find evidence to support our theory. Specifically, we find that elections lead to fewer unanimous decisions and more separate written opinions, indicating that judicial elections may have a more pervasive effect on the daily work of these courts than previously thought.

We contribute to the literature on judicial independence and performance in the states by analyzing opinion clarity. Written opinions are the primary means of communication for state supreme court justices, and clarity is a core component of judicial performance. Using automated text analysis on a sample of state supreme court opinions from all 50 states, we find that variation in judicial retention systems is not associated with substantively meaningful differences in opinion clarity. Furthermore, elected judges do not seem to produce clearer opinions in salient cases notwithstanding the increased public visibility of those decisions. These results suggest that judges tend to conform to prevailing professional norms despite differing institutional pressures.

Michael J. New, in a recent article in this journal, argues that a major reason for the decline in the incidence of abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1992 Casey decision was the increased number of antiabortion laws—parental involvement laws and informed consent laws—enacted at the state level. However, New's analysis contained critical data, measurement, methodological and estimation errors. This article details all the errors and then reexamines the effect of restrictive state abortion laws on the incidence of abortion over the period 1985–2005. The empirical results find little evidence that the decline in the number of abortions performed since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1992 Casey decision was due to the increase in the number of informed consent and parental involvement laws enacted.

We offer the first systematic assessment of the factors thought to account for the quality and prestige of public research universities in the United States. We take account, too, of those potential causal factors identified in both contemporary and early descriptive research on these institutions. Our findings indicate that attributes of universities and their states from the first half of the twentieth century as well as some of their contemporary attributes are powerful predictors of their success in National Research Council peer evaluations of their research programs. The results provide a foundation for efforts to account systematically for the research achievements of these universities and evidence on state public policy influences on those research achievements.

Do judges defer to executives with increased institutional control over the executive branch? Administrative agencies play a key role in the policy implementation process. Executives could view aggressive judicial review of executive branch activity as a threat to executive power and negatively respond to perceived judicial intrusions. Governors across the country possess varying amounts of institutional authority over the agencies that comprise their states' executive branches. For example, in many states, executive branch officials are elected by the public or appointed by someone other than the governor. Increased fragmentation increases the difficulty of centralized management and decreases gubernatorial influence over the executive branch. I examine whether state supreme courts defer more to agencies in states where governors have more formal control over the executive branch. I find that state supreme courts are more likely to rule in favor of state administrative agencies in states where the governor has increased appointment power and increased power to review agency rulemaking.

Research shows that when the more liberal Democratic Party controls the national government, unemployment is lower, but whether liberal state governments are associated with lower unemployment has not been examined. We argue that more left-leaning governments in the U.S. states have the same preference for and willingness to use government to reduce unemployment, but that the greater resource and policymaking constraints that the states face during economic downturns limit their ability to shape unemployment to economic growth periods. We find evidence for these arguments in an analysis of the U.S. states for the period of 1975–2010. Specifically, when economic growth is low, liberal state governments are associated with increases in unemployment rates similar to or even somewhat higher than conservative governments, but when growth is moderate to high, liberal state governments are associated with greater-than-expected reductions in unemployment. We also provide some evidence that different state spending decisions between liberal and conservative state governments may explain these patterns.

Marshall Medoff and Christopher Dennis identify some errors in National Abortion Rights Action League's (NARAL) data on the effective start dates of various state-level antiabortion laws. However, they misunderstand the purpose of my 2011 State Politics and Policy Quarterly article which was to measure the impact of a range of antiabortion laws—not analyze competing theories as to why the abortion rate has fallen in the United States. Furthermore, their analysis contains a number of critical measurement, and methodological and estimation errors. When these errors are corrected, the empirical results add to the substantial body of peer-reviewed research which finds that public funding restrictions, parental involvement laws, and properly designed informed consent laws all reduce the incidence of abortion.

My article examines whether supermajority vote requirements (SMVR) to raise taxes in California's constitution suppresses state tax burdens. SMVR is a politically popular but contentious measure that 16 states have adopted and many other states have attempted to adopt. The rationale behind the rule is to contain the growth of government by making it costly to form a winning coalition to raise taxes. Nonetheless, the current empirical literature is mixed at best and suffers from causal inference. I take a different approach from extant literature and estimate the causal effect of SMVR on tax burdens in California by using synthetic control methods. The results show that, from 1979 to 2008, SMVR reduced the state nonproperty tax burden by an average of $1.44 per $100 of personal income, which is equivalent to 21% of the total tax burden for each year. The effect of SMVR was immediate after its adoption, but has abated over time.

Local option sales taxes have become an important source of local revenue across the United States. Thirty-three of the 50 states have granted authorization to their counties or cities (or both) to levy local option sales taxes, and said taxes generated nearly $50 billion in 2005, which accounted for 11% of all local tax revenue nationwide. Even though local option sales taxes have significant impacts on a county's ability to fund programs and services, little has been written about the decisions of counties to place such taxes on the ballot. Using demographic, fiscal, and political variables, a model is developed that explains the decision to place a county transportation sales tax on the ballot. Modeling and analysis reveal that counties behave strategically as the impact of demographic, fiscal, and political factors on the decision to place a local option sales tax on the ballot is shaped by whether the county is making an initial attempt to adopt, a subsequent attempt to adopt after voter rejection, or a renewal attempt when an existing local option sales tax is nearing its sunset date.

In this note, we revisit the work of Carson and Crespinto examine the effect of different redistricting plans on competitiveness in U.S. House elections. Similar to the previous results, our probit estimates on an expanded dataset that includes redistricting cycles from 1972 to 2012 reveal that commission and court-drawn districts experience more competition on average than those drawn by legislatures. These results provide additional support for the hypothesis that one way to increase the competitiveness of congressional elections is to allow extra-legislative bodies to draw congressional district boundaries.

In New's response to our article he concedes that (1) his dataset had over 150 misclassification errors, (2) used an incorrect weight to correct for heteroscedasticity, (3) did not control for interstate travel by women to an out-of-state abortion provider, and (4) some of his empirical results are numerically implausible. Unfortunately, in New's reanalysis he makes many of the same errors as in his original article. Ironically, New's empirical evidence in Table 3 of his reassessment article corroborates our findings that informed consent laws (all statistically insignificant in his Table 3) had no measurable impact on the abortion rate of all women of childbearing age, adult women or teen minors over the period 1985- 2005. Moreover, New fails to acknowledge that he has a conflict of interest. He is an adjunct scholar with the self-proclaimed antiabortion Charlotte Lozier Institute. In addition, on September 15, 2012 at the annual meeting of Value Voters sponsored by the antiabortion Family Research Council, he told an audience of social conservatives that to stop abortions they should support legislation in states that would length the waiting period to have an abortion to nine months (audio available).

Voters often make decisions on ballot measures with limited information. Research shows, however, that elite endorsements can help voters overcome their information deficiencies. Using survey experiments, we evaluate the effect of a gubernatorial endorsement on three recent ballot measures. We find that identifying the governor as a proponent of a particular measure has a significant effect on respondents' support for only one of the three ballot measures we examine: a highly publicized health initiative in 2000. For two lower profile referendums on bonds supporting higher education (in 2006) and roads (in 2011), a gubernatorial endorsement proved ineffective. These results hold even when we restrict our sample to respondents who are the most likely to be influenced by the treatment. As a result, we tentatively conclude that gubernatorial endorsements, while valuable to some voters, are highly conditional.

I offer a novel way of documenting the flow of power between the state and federal governments. Rather than look at programs or expenditures, I examine the behavior of elected officials. Assuming that ambitious politicians gravitate toward the locus of political power, I track the flow of elected officials in the American federal system. Specifically, I look at the career paths of more than 12,000 individuals who served in the U.S. Congress between 1789 and 2012. By analyzing the movement of elected officials between the state and federal levels, I confirm the prevailing story line on the evolution of American federalism while generating a measure that can be used to assess the relative distribution of power in the system across time.

This article explains governors' decisions to support or oppose Medicaid expansions offered under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We theorize that governors' decisions to oppose the funding should depend on both political demands and the level of need in the state, though politics and need are often in tension. We find that governors' partisanship and the composition of the legislature have substantively meaningful effects on governors' decisions, but the level of need in the state exerts little effect on governors' decisions. This suggests that for high profile, highly politicized issues such as the Affordable Care Act, political considerations outweigh the needs of citizens and state economic conditions in gubernatorial decision making.

Legislative professionalism has played a prominent role in state politics research for decades. Despite the attention paid to its causes and consequences, recent research has largely set aside questions about professionalism's conceptualization and operationalization. Usually measuring it as an aggregate index, scholars theoretically and empirically treat professionalism as a unidimensional concept. In this article, we argue that exclusive use of aggregate indices can limit state politics research. Using a new dataset with almost 40 years of data on state legislative resources, salary, and session length, we reconsider the validity of using an index to study professionalism across the states. We evaluate the internal consistency of professionalism components over time, the relationship between components and the Squire Index, and the degree to which professionalism components are unidimensional using classical multidimensional scaling. We find enough commonality and enough variation between professionalism components to support a range of measurement strategies like the use of unidimensional indices (such as the Squire Index), disaggregating the components and analyzing their effects individually, or formulating multidimensional measures. Scholars should take care to choose the appropriate measure of the concept that best fits the causal relationships under examination.

Presidential vote shares in legislative districts are widely available for congressional districts and are often used by scholars in their research. Here, I describe the general methodology to construct statewide vote shares within districts and apply these methods to a new database of presidential vote shares within 36 states' legislative districts.

We investigate the relationship between electoral institutions and committee autonomy in the context of U.S. state legislatures. The distributive theories of legislative organization suggest that electoral rules that make personal reputations more important motivate legislators to decentralize power and enhance committee autonomy to be able to target particularistic goods to their local constituencies. We argue that the distributive theories have direct implications for the relationship between candidate selection procedures and committee autonomy. The need to reach out to a large number of voters and to amass significant financial resources in states with more inclusive candidate selection procedures such as the open primary makes representatives more dependent on special interests, which is conducive to legislative particularism and committee autonomy. We take advantage of the great variation across the American states to investigate the effects of candidate selection procedures, a factor neglected in the previous literature. Examining 24 state legislatures from 1955 to 1995, we find that the inclusiveness of the selectorate, or the body electing candidates, has a significant effect on committee autonomy with more inclusive primary elections leading to more autonomous committee systems. By contrast, however, term limits were not a significant predictor of committee autonomy. This contributes to our understanding of how legislators amend institutional arrangements to achieve their electoral goals.

State legislatures have been extremely active in passing legislation relating to all facets of immigration policy over the last several years. In this article, I develop a framework that explains how party ideology, party control of the legislature, and electoral conditions affect the likelihood that a state legislature will adopt policies that increase immigration enforcement. I test my arguments using state immigration policy adoption data that span from 2005 to 2011. I find that conservative Republican state parties are more likely to pass legislation enhancing immigration enforcement—on the condition that the Republican Party controls the state's legislative institutions. However, the willingness of Republican-controlled legislatures to pass immigration reform is often tempered by electoral concerns. Republican-controlled legislatures in states where Latinos make up a large proportion of the electorate are significantly less likely to adopt new legislation that targets undocumented migrants. I argue that Republican support for increasing sanctions on undocumented migrants is eroded by the potential for an electoral backlash from Latino voters. Democratic-controlled legislatures are unlikely to pass legislation under any conditions. Ultimately, the observed pattern of policy adoption is the product of the trade-off between the state parties' ideologically driven policy goals and the electoral consequences associated with actually implementing immigration policies.

Despite many important recent advances in the study of policy diffusion, this research has devoted limited attention to what happens after the adoption decision. This article attempts to fill this gap in diffusion research by examining the adoption and subsequent modification of “Three Strikes and You're Out” laws in the American states. Its analysis suggests that distinct political forces affected state-level outcomes at these two stages of the policymaking process. The rapid spread of Three Strikes laws in the 1990s seems to have occurred because states with more conservative leanings and higher proportions of African-American residents gravitated to a salient and visible policy. In contrast, the modification of Three Strikes laws appears to have been encouraged by financial necessity and shifting ideological environments but hindered by the mobilization of stakeholders with an interest in preserving the status quo, including private prison operators and prison officer unions. The contrast illustrates the usefulness of treating policy diffusion as a multistage process, and the stakeholder mobilization results provide empirical support for recent theorizing about policy feedback effects.