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.

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.

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.

A well-established scholarly tradition links lower voting costs with higher turnout. Whereas previous research emphasized the costs imposed by requiring voter registration, our research assesses postregistration costs and state policies that can make it easier for registered citizens to vote. These policies include mailing each registrant a sample ballot and information about the location of his or her polling place, providing a longer voting day, and requiring firms to give their employees time off to vote. Using the 2000 Voter Supplement to the Current Population Survey, we find that all but the last of these provisions enhance turnout, especially by the young and the less educated. Compared to a state that does none of these things, the estimated turnout of high school dropouts is nearly 11 percentage points higher in a state with these “best practices”; their effect on young registrants is nearly 10 points. Because African American and Latino registrants are disproportionately younger and less educated, they would benefit disproportionately from universal adoption of such postregistration laws. We estimate that if every state adopted these best practices, overall turnout of those registered would increase approximately three percentage points.

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.

Despite calls for greater deliberation among citizens on public policy, we have little information about how existing deliberation is structured or how well it works. We examine Connecticut's effort to put public deliberation to work in Medicaid policymaking. Findings from our participant-observation study and in-person interviews with 100 participants in this process suggest some important qualifications to literature on public deliberation. Greater inclusion of diverse social groups from the target population is important, but this should not replace the inclusion of professional advocates since the latter are often more willing than citizen representatives to challenge policy experts on technical issues. Incorporating public deliberation into the process at an early stage is ideal, but deliberation during the later stages of policymaking (including during implementation) can still produce useful results. Finally, the style and purpose of deliberation can shape the range of topics on the agenda, so it is important to understand how the structure of a deliberative forum can affect the style and purpose of deliberation.

It is widely believed that direct democracy, in the form of the initiative, brought about cuts in state taxes and spending over the last quarter century. This belief is based on firsthand observation, case studies, and more than a dozen statistical studies (Matsusaka 2004). Marschall and Ruhil (2005) focus on one of the central issues in this literature: Did the initiative cause this perceived reduction in taxes and spending, or was there some unmeasured factor that led to adoption of the initiative as well as spending and tax cuts?

Modern American state governorships have great formal policymaking authority, but, like the presidency, they also possess various informal powers to influence policymakers and policymaking. Among the most important of these informal powers is a governor's popularity with the public. Efforts to explain variation in gubernatorial popularity have yielded mixed results, in part because of limited data on governors' approval ratings and underspecified models. We assess the determinants of gubernatorial popularity that fall along both a national-state dimension and an economic-political dimension using the new U.S. Officials Job Approval Ratings dataset. Our results suggest that the proper focus of gubernatorial popularity research should be to distinguish not between its national and state influences but between its economic and political influences, as both national and state unemployment rates are central to explaining public assessments of governors in our models.

The 1990s saw some of the most dramatic changes in the American social welfare system in recent decades at both the national and state levels. In particular, states were granted, and took advantage of, much wider latitude in deciding who is eligible to receive welfare benefits. To what extent did the composition of a state's electorate influence the restrictiveness of the welfare eligibility requirements it adopted at this time? We find that in states where lower-class voter turnout was comparable to that of the upper class, lawmakers were less likely to pass restrictive welfare eligibility rules. We also find that electorates in states with restrictive voter registration laws are much more likely to be biased toward upper-class turnout. Thus, lower-class voter mobilization can affect the ability of the disadvantaged to achieve policies consistent with their interests, but state voter registration laws pose a substantial barrier to such mobilization.

Do instruments of direct democracy affect policymaking and, if so, how? The political science literature is rife with increasingly sophisticated empirical efforts to answer these questions (Matsusaka 2004; Lupia and Matsusaka 2004). Having expended much energy over the past two decades studying the initiative's effects on state and local policy, Matsusaka (1995, 2004) is convinced that initiative states spend and tax less than states without the initiative (2004, 3; 1995). Agnostic about whether initiative states spend and tax more or less than noninitiative states but puzzled by scholars' failure to account for the endogeneity of the initiative in their models, we sought to determine whether the fiscal conservatism ascribed to the initiative remained after explicitly modeling states' initiative status. Our study, published in this issue of State Politics and Policy Quarterly contradicts Matsusaka's conclusions.

In the past few decades, the states have gained more discretion over policy adoption and implementation. Some of this expanded discretion has resulted from federal court rulings, as the states have increasingly used these courts to achieve their policy goals. But some states are more successful in the federal courts than others. Why is this? We examine cases argued by states in the United States Courts of Appeals between 1970 and 1996 to answer this question. Contrary to research at the Supreme Court level, we find no overall trend that the states are becoming more efficacious in court over time. We also find that the differences among the states' success in court cannot be attributed simply, or even primarily, to disparities in resources. Rather, case attributes and judicial attitudes provide the best explanations for state success in the Courts of Appeals.

Does direct democracy make it impossible to balance public sector budgets? I address this question with evidence from California, where it is widely believed that voter initiatives have paralyzed the state budget process by locking in high spending while simultaneously prohibiting tax increases. A review of all initiatives approved since 1912 shows that no more than 32 percent of appropriations in the 2003-04 California state budget were locked in by initiatives and that initiatives placed only minimal constraints on the legislature's ability to raise revenue. Moreover, it is likely that the legislature would have allocated much of the money to its dedicated purpose even if it had not been required to do so by initiative. Initiatives do not appear to be a significant obstacle to balancing the state budget in California.

Can government institutions strengthen the influence of public opinion on policymaking? While institutions often limit representation, I identify two institutional features of state lawmaking that may enhance democratic control, but in somewhat different ways. I hypothesize that one institution external to the state legislature—the ballot initiative—improves representation on specific issues, while one institution internal to the legislature—the committee discharge procedure—enhances responsiveness to mass preferences generally. This difference emerges because legislators engage in repeated interactions and logrolling across a wide range of issues while advocates of ballot initiatives do not. My analyses largely, although not entirely, support these hypotheses, with the initiative making abortion policy more responsive and committee discharge making policy generally more responsive. These results suggest a domain-specific influence of institutions that were previously thought to have similar effects on policy representation.

Recently, several studies of Congress and the state legislatures have found evidence to support the information theory of legislative organization, that is, that legislatures develop committees whose characteristics reflect those of the parent body so as to acquire unbiased policy and political information. However, most of these studies have been conducted on the lower, larger legislative chambers. Senates, as smaller bodies that often follow the lead of legislation originating in their lower chambers, may have less need for unbiased information, perhaps allowing those bodies to develop more outlying, unrepresentative committees. We test this hypothesis in 42 state senates and find that unrepresentative committees also tend to be the exception in these upper chambers. Furthermore, as shown in previous studies of state house committees, the frequency of committee outliers in state senates appears to be idiosyncratic, with cultural, political, and institutional variables being unable to account for their observed patterns. While results support the information theory of legislative organization, evidence of outliers among party delegations on committees in these senates provides some support for the party-dominant theory.

Do salient ballot initiatives stimulate voting? Recent studies have shown that initiatives increase voter turnout, but some methodological concerns still linger. These studies have either relied solely on aggregate data to make inferences about individual-level behavior or used a flawed measure of initiative salience. Using individual-level data from the National Election Studies, I find that ballot question salience indeed stimulated voting in the midterm elections of 1990 and 1994. In an election with moderately salient ballot questions, a person's likelihood of voting can increase by as much as 30 percent in a midterm election. On the other hand, consistent with most prior research, I find no statistically significant relationship between ballot question salience and voting in presidential elections.

Electing members of legislatures through multimember districts (MMDs) reduces racial and ethnic minorities' descriptive representation in those bodies, but is their substantive representation also hurt? Do legislative MMDs lead to worse policy outcomes for minorities independent of their effect on legislative demographics? To address these questions, I examine welfare policy in the states from 1997 to 2000. I find evidence that suggests that states whose upper legislative chamber is comprised of MMDs have significantly less generous welfare policy. I conclude that MMDs do indeed damage the substantive representation of racial and ethnic minorities in legislatures, independent of their effect on descriptive representation.

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.

Does the type of policy being considered determine the politics surrounding it? In this article, I examine how policy reversals may produce different politics than initial policy adoptions in the context of state river management policy. Traditionally, dam building was the dominant management policy, but in recent decades, efforts to restore rivers to their natural conditions through the removal of dams have become more prominent. I find that the patterns of state policymaking for policy reversals are generally similar to those that have been documented for policy adoptions, but with some important differences. Diffusion of reversals involves more states outside of active regions than is seen typically with policy adoption, and reversal diffusion occurs more gradually than adoption diffusion with many policy innovations. Finally, the most important determinants of these state policy reversals are a state's fiscal health and the presence of relevant interest groups.

Since 1990, the American states have adopted a variety of reforms to regulate lobbying in an attempt to address a host of ethical issues. Such regulation can have important impacts on a variety of aspects of the legislative process because it typically impacts the relationships between legislators and lobbyists. How does such lobbying regulation vary across the states and over time? I have developed a measure of state lobbying regulation from 1990-2003. This measure validly captures the laws that limit relationships between lobbyists and legislators and, as such, can be used to help assess a variety of hypotheses about the legislative process.

I use computer-assisted content analysis of gubernatorial state of the state addresses in 2000 and 2001 to measure state governors' ideology. These speeches provide an excellent direct measure of governors' preferences, values, and ideology. This method produced reliable and valid indicators of the ideology of state governors. The ideological content of these speeches clearly distinguishes governors on the basis of their party affiliation. Researchers should consider the content analysis of speeches and other public pronouncements as a useful way of assessing the views of governors and other public officials and incorporating them into models of state policy and politics.