In the last 30 years, female state legislative representation in the United States has increased steadily and dramatically. While the cross-sectional variation in this representation has been studied at length, longitudinal changes have yet to be explained. We attempt to do this using two theories of large-scale cultural and political attitude change over the last several decades—postmaterialism and post-industrialism. Our empirical analyses are more consistent with post-industrialism theory than postmaterialism theory. We find that both cross-sectional differences and longitudinal changes in the percentage of state legislators who are female are explained primarily by college education and religious adherence, not age cohort or income. The effects of college education and religious adherence remain strong even in the presence of controls for other cultural and institutional variables that have been found to influence the sexual composition of state legislatures. Thus, our study suggests the existence of an education-religion cleavage on social issues among Americans.

Are the politics of welfare policy for the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor the same? We use pooled cross-sectional time-series analyses of state government discretionary welfare spending on general assistance (GA) and Supplemental Security Income supplements (SSI-S) to address this question. We find that efforts to assist the GA population decline as electoral competition increases while efforts to assist the SSI-S population increase, providing evidence that only the deserving poor are favored by heightened political competition. We also find that SSI-S benefits rise with ideological liberalism, electoral competition, and the percentage of African Americans in a state. When considered in light of the negative effect of larger African American populations on states' SSI-S efforts, this suggests targeting of particular groups. Finally, we find that SSI-S enrollments are reduced, but the per-recipient payments are increased under state administration, suggesting that state administrators are more likely to provide more services to existing clientele than to expand their client base.

Representation in political institutions, including the judiciary, is an important consideration for both political scientists and citizens. What factors systematically influence diversity among judges? In particular, does the method of selection affect the relative success of political minorities in attaining a seat on the bench? The answers to these questions have substantial normative and theoretical implications. We examine judges on all state supreme and intermediate appellate courts in 1985 and 1999 to assess the influence of various structural, political, and demographic factors on judicial diversity. We demonstrate that the ability of political minorities to attain a place in the judiciary is not solely a function of any single factor. Instead, their success is influenced by a multifaceted combination of factors contingent on time and the level of the court, and these influences differ for women and for minorities.

We know that state legislative election campaigns have become increasingly expensive in recent years, but have they also become more professionally run? We assess the degree to which campaign professionals have proliferated in state legislative election campaigns and explain this development in terms of the institutional changes in state legislatures and the “congressionalization” of state legislative elections. Nearly one-half of all state legislative candidates answering our survey had hired professionals for their campaigns, using them mostly for direct mail, media advertising, campaign management, and polling. Open-seat candidates waged more professional campaigns than incumbents or their challengers. We find that campaign professionalism in state legislative elections is primarily a function of campaign spending, but that challengers hire professionals at lower spending levels. We also find that employing professionals improves the electoral performance of challengers, but not that of incumbents or open-seat candidates.

Was state financial regulation a major cause of the massive savings and loan (S&L) failures in the late 1980s? This question is critical at a time of continuing devolution of regulatory authority to the states. We employ a database of information on nearly 4,000 S&Ls in this period to understand the factors that led some of them to fail. We find that state-chartered S&Ls failed at higher rates than federally chartered firms, but that the extremely high failure rate of Texas-chartered S&Ls explains all of this difference. The actions of a single, large state can make an enormous difference in the American federal system of regulation. We also find that stock-owned S&Ls failed at a higher rate than mutually owned S&Ls, and that S&Ls chartered in jurisdictions with more autonomous regulatory structures failed at a higher rate. Thus, when the principal-agent relationship in S&L regulation was weakest, S&L failures were most prevalent.

What is the impact of direct democracy on citizens' political participation and knowledge? Progressive Era reformers and normative theorists have argued that institutional procedures allowing citizens a more direct role in government decision-making will increase civic engagement, broadly defined. Using American National Election Studies data for 1996, 1998, and 2000, we test this hypothesis. Our multivariate analysis suggests that exposure to ballot initiatives increases the probability of voting, stimulates campaign contributions to interest groups, and enhances political knowledge. However, we find that the impact of the initiative process on political participation and knowledge varies with electoral context.

How do Americans feel about the respective policy responsibilities of the national and state governments? This article addresses this question using data from a public opinion survey in South Carolina. The study has three major findings. First, people do seem to have meaningful opinions about national versus state government responsibilities, regardless of whether the issue is presented in policy-specific or general terms. Second, framing effects do not exist for these attitudes because the aggregate distributions of opinion do not change across the two presentations. Third, citizens' beliefs about specific programmatic activities appear to be derived largely from their more general comparative evaluations of the national and state governments. These findings have important implications for both scholarly theories of and practical political concerns about federalism in the United States.

In contrast to research on congressional and state legislative elections, strategic entry into gubernatorial contests has been largely unexplored. We examine the influence of incumbency, gubernatorial popularity, and other factors on candidate strategic decisions and the resulting level of competition in nonincumbent-party gubernatorial primaries between 1974 and 2000. We find that incumbency and gubernatorial popularity interact in their effect, with popular incumbents discouraging competition and unpopular incumbents encouraging it. The size of the potential candidate pool, the condition of the state economy, state partisanship, and state party endorsement practices also influence competition.

Why do state legislators enact policies that conflict with their immediate self-interest? I address this question by assessing the impact of traditional and non-traditional policy determinants on ethics policy adoption. Specifically, I use event history analysis to identify the factors that explain the authorization of independent state legislative ethics commissions from 1973 to 1996. I find that the determinants of ethics policy are substantially, but not completely, different from those of other policies, with ethics policy fitting into an agenda-setting model better than many other policies. Scandals and the actions of other states played a prominent role in setting the agenda and facilitating the authorization of ethics commissions. The agenda-setting process transforms the immediate self-interest of legislators on this issue from one of concern about their own economic well being to one of concern about re-election. In addition, political culture, institutional power arrangements, legislative compensation, and party competition had small but discernible effects on the likelihood of a state establishing a legislative ethics commission.

Why do states persist in offering large financial incentives to induce firms to relocate to or expand in the state, a practice commonly derided as “smokestack chasing?” The conventional wisdom is that while these incentives have little effect on firms' business decisions in the long term, they are a good political strategy for governors seeking to improve economic conditions and political support in the short term. I test these hypotheses by examining the economic and electoral impact of industrial recruitment policies in Wisconsin, Virginia, Michigan, North Carolina, Maryland, Indiana, and Kentucky. I find, first, that these policies pay immediate dividends for governors by increasing county-level job growth and per capita income prior to the next election. Second, governors recruit firms strategically to relocate to counties that opposed them in the previous election. But, third, this industrial recruitment does not increase electoral support for the governor. In fact, the more success a governor has in recruiting firms or jobs to a county, the fewer votes he or she receives in it in the next election.

American chief executives are popularly believed to play a crucial leadership role in the legislative process, but this role is not well understood by scholars. This article develops a model of executive leadership success in the legislative arena based on personal, institutional, political, and economic factors and tests that model with data on the legislative priorities of the 50 state governors in 1993-94. Institutional features of the executive, which have been the focus of much scholarship, are found to have little effect on a governor's legislative success. On the other hand, the nature of the legislature is quite important here, with more professional legislatures actually encouraging executive leadership. A governor's personal characteristics, political party, and a state's economy also influence a governor's legislative success. These findings point to the importance of examining chief executives in the context in which they work if we are to understand their role as legislative leader.

There is tremendous nonrandom variation from state to state in the rates at which people overreport voting in the Current Population Surveys (CPS). What accounts for this state-level bias in overreporting? We find that the determinants of statewide rates of overreporting parallel those in our earlier findings on individual-level overreporting: overreporting is a function of higher concentrations of racial and ethnic minorities, higher rates of religious membership, and being in the Deep South. These relationships are remarkably stable over time (1980-2000), and they are unaltered by improvements in how we measure overreporting. We suggest a method for deflating reported statewide registration figures to account for this bias, assuming that these registration figures are inflated in the same way as are statewide voting figures. We replicate and extend a part of Brown, Jackson, and Wright's (1999) analysis using these deflated figures, showing that our approach can improve explanation.

This article serves three purposes. First, we present a new source of campaign finance data for the 50 states. This includes annual data on candidate expenditures in gubernatorial races from 1977 to 2001, as well as triennial and biennial data on campaign finance laws affecting gubernatorial races during this period. Second, we review the various sources of campaign finance data for the 50 states. Third, we examine the challenges of collecting and compiling data across the 50 states, since these data can vary so much in availability and measurement. We hope to provide some general lessons to researchers collecting or working with all types of cross-state data.

State-level research affords scholars a unique opportunity to study legislative behavior because state legislators are accessible in ways that members of congress are not. State legislators' willingness to respond to interviews and questionnaires has provided scholars with a rich array of data about their behavior and perceptions. This survey research has contributed greatly to our theoretical and practical knowledge of legislative behavior and institutions. We examine 73 articles published in top academic journals from 1975 to 2000 to identify common techniques of surveying state legislators and suggest ways in which scholars can enhance the prospects for collecting high quality data. We also consider what type of collective efforts could be undertaken to enhance this underutilized resource for studying legislative politics.

The American state legislatures provide a unique opportunity for the study of lawmaking. This essay describes and analyzes state legislative research since 1990 and offers suggestions for future research. The discipline made significant gains during this period, expanding our knowledge on a wide variety of important topics and concerns. Despite these gains, many gaps in our knowledge remain unfilled and many questions remain unanswered. The field has been particularly weak in building theory. Scholars need to make a more concerted effort to develop our theoretical understanding of state legislatures for the field to develop greater direction and coherence.

What is the impact of campaign spending on the vote in gubernatorial primaries? Is spending by challengers and incumbents equally effective? Answering these questions could shed light on the effectiveness of incumbent spending in elections generally and on the impact of campaign finance reform. In a two-stage least squares analysis of primaries from 1980 to 2000, this study finds that spending by incumbent governors has no independent impact on their vote share. On the other hand, spending by challengers is effective in attracting votes, even after controlling for challenger quality and incumbent popularity. However, relatively few races are close enough for challenger spending to be decisive. This suggests that to improve gubernatorial primary competition, states would need to increase public campaign funding and spending limits substantially.

We use a survey of State House reporters to measure corruption in state government and assess the priority federal prosecutors place on corruption investigations. The reliability and validity of the corruption measures are assessed, as are the relationships among corruption level, federal prosecutorial effort, and the number of federal prosecutions. Federal corruption prosecutions are positively correlated with both corruption and prosecutorial effort. Hence, we argue that federal prosecution data provide a potentially biased and unreliable measure of state public corruption.

This note examines problems associated with measuring the partisan balance of state government. A description of a new publicly available dataset is given, as well as of the methods used to collect these data. The results of three data analyses using different measures of state government partisan balance demonstrate that sometimes measurement error on this variable can influence substantive findings.