Welfare reform gave the U.S. states the opportunity to engage in second-order devolution (SOD), which allows local governments to exercise more discretion in the implementation of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Proponents of welfare decentralization insist that local governments better understand the needs of the poor and are therefore able to implement TANF more effectively. Nevertheless, opponents argue that decentralization could lead to a “race to the bottom” and, thus, SOD might lead to more restrictive TANF implementation. We investigate these competing claims by examining how differences in decentralization affect (1) TANF caseload decline, (2) the use of sanctions, and (3) several work-related outcomes among recipients. Based on a series of state-level analyses, we find that SOD states experienced a greater degree of caseload decline than non-SOD states. In addition, SOD states were more likely to use punitive policy tools, such as TANF sanctions. However, we also find that SOD states display marginally better TANF performance, as reflected in higher rates of employment exits and earnings gains among TANF recipients. Thus, we find support for both sides of the decentralization debate.

Berry et al.'s (1998) measures of U.S. state citizen and government ideology rely on unadjusted interest-group ratings for a state's members of Congress to infer information about (1) the ideological orientation of the electorates that selected them or (2) state legislators and the governor from the same state. Potential weaknesses in unadjusted interest-group ratings prompt the question: Are the Berry et al. measures flawed, and if so, can they be fixed by substituting alternative measures of a member's ideology? We conclude that a version of the Berry et al. state government ideology indicator relying on NOMINATE common space scores is marginally superior to the extant version. In contrast, we reaffirm the validity of the original state citizen ideology indicator and find that versions based on NOMINATE common space scores and adjusted ADA and COPE scores introduced by Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder (1999) are weaker.

Multi-state lawsuits, filed by U.S. state attorneys general (AGs), have become an important method by which state consumer protection laws are enforced. Patterns of participation in these lawsuits vary tremendously across the states, yet little is known about the factors driving this variation. I argue that state AGs are primarily concerned with achieving electoral and policymaking goals. Consequently, I expect AGs to be responsive to strong consumer interests and to participate in cases with severe infractions. Additionally, whether it is for public interest or electoral goals, AGs should be attracted to cases that promise bigger settlements. My analysis of each state's decision to join each of 172 multi-state lawsuits filed and settled between 1989 and 2002 provides support for each of these hypotheses.

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.

We construct measures of U.S. state partisan identification, self-reported ideology, and policy mood using data from the 2000 and 2004 National Annenberg Election Surveys (NAES) and the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). These measures improve on existing methods for estimating state-level preferences because the surveys provide larger state samples without pooling across years. After detailing our methods for constructing the measures, we assess their validity through comparisons with measures already in use by scholars of state politics. We find that our measures correlate strongly with those created by Erikson, Wright, and McIver (1993) and Berry et al. (1998) and with measures from state-level polls. We conclude that our measures can be useful to research in state politics.

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 article, I examine whether a constituency's political brand—defined here as the reputation that white evangelicals and Catholics have for “pro-life” abortion policy—influences the public abortion position taken by members in six U.S. state Houses of Representatives. At issue is whether constituent political brand functions as a non-interest group influence on state legislators. A fitting of the brand literature to the state politics domain suggests that the effect of political brand might be dependent on constituent presence in a state House district—be it the relative size of the constituency or its organizational (church-based) cohesion. Results confirm the influence of constituent political brand and point to white evangelicals as having an influence on a member's abortion position based on the size and homogeneity of their constituency. Catholics possess brand influence as well, but theirs is powered by the church's organizational—parish—presence and cohesion in U.S. state House districts. These findings suggest that the two major “pro-life” constituencies in American politics are able to leverage brand in the political realm in ways that the literature has not previously considered.

The introduction of McDonald and Popkin's (2001) measure of the voting eligible turnout rate represents an important advancement in the literature on voter turnout in the United States, most of which was based on studies of turnout among the voting age population. Among other things, their measure called into question many of the findings of research on the decline in turnout during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In this article, we investigate how the measurement of voter turnout affects the interpretation of the sources of turnout in the states. Focusing on voting-age and voting-eligible turnout in presidential elections from 1980 to 2004 as separate dependent variables, we estimate models of state-level turnout and compare the results for each of the measures. Our findings suggest that measurement does matter in state-level voter turnout models and that some inferences drawn from studies of turnout among the voting age population are not sustained when substituting voting eligible turnout.

The Christian Right is a powerful force in contemporary state Republican party politics. In this article, I create a new comprehensive measure of that influence and offer a theoretical framework through which to understand how influence varies across the states. Drawing from the insights of social movement theory, the results of the data analysis demonstrate the importance of the movement's internal resources and the state political context in which the Christian Right seeks to influence state Republican party politics.

All 50 U.S. states currently regulate lobbying. Data restrictions, however, limit our understanding of the relationship between legislative lobbying laws and interest group influence within the legislative process over time. A comparable measure of these laws published in the summer 2005 issue of State Politics and Policy Quarterly suggests a dynamic analysis. The early 1990s witnessed a marked increase in the stringency of state legislative lobbying regulations. This article examines how lobbying regulation impacted interest group influence across all 50 state legislatures in 1995. I then determine whether changes in a state's regulations affected interest group influence over time from 1990 to 1995. Evidence suggests that increased regulation reduces influence both across and within states over time.

College students in the U.S. have long faced barriers to college town registration and voting. Arguably, these barriers raise the costs associated with electoral participation for students living away from home. Despite ongoing debate about where students should vote, the extent to which college town restrictions limit participation by students has never been estimated. This article is the first to demonstrate that college town registration barriers implemented by the U.S. states reduce participation in national elections.

The rapid growth of the Latino population in the U.S. over the past 15 years has led to a significant increase in levels of primary and secondary school enrollment rates of Latino children. Research on Latino education has demonstrated the institutional and contextual challenges faced by this increasingly significant group, but studies that link Latino representation and Latino educational performance have neglected to sort out the direct and indirect effects of representation on student achievement. The central assumption in these studies outlines a causal chain running from Latino political representation (school boards), to Latino bureaucratic representation (administrators and teachers), to Latino student performance. This study tests these theoretical assumptions by employing a path analytic model using data from 1,040 Texas school districts for the years 1997–2001 to tease out the direct and indirect effects of Latino representation on Latino student achievement. We find robust evidence of the impact of Latino political representation on Latino educational attainment in Texas, operating via a direct effect on the number of Latino administrators and teachers and an indirect effect on Latino student performance. Additionally, our results demonstrate that descriptive representation becomes substantive representation in the area of education policy for Latinos and that this relationship remains strong over time. These findings underscore the importance of school board elections and school district hiring practices on Latino student performance.

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.

Many hypotheses in U.S. state politics research are multi-level, positing that state-level variables affect individual-level behavior. Unadjusted standard errors for state-level variables are too small, leading to overconfidence and possible false rejection of null hypotheses. Primo, Jacobsmeier, and Milyo (2007) explore this problem in their reanalysis of Wolfinger, Highton, and Mullin's (2005) data on the effects of post-registration laws on voter turnout. Primo et al. advocate the use of clustered standard errors to solve the overconfidence problem, but we offer an alternative solution: randomization tests. Randomization tests are non-parametric tests that do not rely on comparisons to theoretical test statistic distributions. Instead, they use distributions tailored to the data, created by randomly scrambling the data many times to simulate what would be observed under the null hypothesis. Unlike with clustering, with the randomization test, U.S. state-level reforms generally fail to be significant both as additive effects and as interactions with individual characteristics.

Most American congregations belong to denominations. These national networks often promote relevant political issues that constituent congregations may choose to address. Therefore, religious organizations might play a significant role in promoting the process of policy diffusion in the U.S. states. At the same time, congregations are tradition-maintaining institutions that focus first on their own immediate concerns, promoting the maintenance of distinctive regional political contexts and reinforcing the variation of federalism. In this article, we assess the role that religious organizations play in American federal democracy, promoting diffusion or the status quo, with respect to one crucial issue on which religious groups have been particularly vocal: the environment and global warming. We employ two datasets (a large-N national survey and two in-depth survey case studies of clergy in Ohio and South Carolina) and find evidence that religious organizations are vast communication networks that can promote policy diffusion, but typically do not.

This article introduces a parsimonious measure of the expressed political orientation of U.S. state governors that compares word choices in their “State of the State” speeches to the language of state and national party platforms. The technique used to generate this measure is Wordscores, a method that relies on the use of reference texts to generate a set of ideal points for gubernatorial rhetoric. I discuss the conventions and substantive content of governors' speeches and the choice of party platforms as reference texts before presenting the average “partisan signal” in speeches by 97 governors in all 50 states between 2000 and 2006.

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.

As numerous pieces of past research have shown, the opinions of state residents significantly influence the politics and policies of the 50 U.S. states. This type of research flourished when aggregate-level indicators of overall state ideology and partisanship were devised from pooled national public opinion polls. This article provides an extension of such research by devising, from state surveys, aggregate-level measures of the ideological and partisan orientations of racial and ethnic minority voters, as well as that of white voters. These new data demonstrate that the opinions of African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans vary across the states, and in many cases, significantly alter the political orientations of a state's citizenry. These data will facilitate research that incorporates racial and ethnic diversity in the study of public opinion, U.S. state politics, and policy.

Our fundamental objective in this article is to explain why certain counties within the U.S continue to restrict the sale of alcohol at the start of the 21st century. What factors identified as important for the initial drive for Prohibition remain important nearly 80 years later? We assess to what extent social, political, and economic variables are related to the presence of restrictions on the sale of alcohol at the county-level across the United States. Analyzing contemporary county-level data from over 3,000 U.S. counties, the strongest factor associated with “dry” status of a county is the religious composition, specifically the presence of Evangelical Protestants. Conversely, a larger concentration of Roman Catholics inhibits prohibition in a county. The regional character of the political geography of contemporary prohibition—the phenomenon is almost entirely Southern—appears to be driven by the uneven distribution of different religious adherents across the country.