States exert significant control over many different types of electoral institutions that influence the tone and direction of political representation in American democracy. Yet almost nothing is known about the consequences of the institution that has the greatest singular impact on the turnout and composition of the electorate: election timing. We argue that off-cycle elections will tend to produce governments that are not well-aligned with the political preferences of their median constituent. To empirically test this expectation, we examine the relationship between election timing and mass–elite congruence across local school district governments. Leveraging variation in election timing across districts within the same state, we find that board members are more likely to hold political preferences that are aligned with their constituents when boards are elected in on- versus off-cycle races. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of representation and election timing, suggesting some possible avenues for future research.

State policies shape firms’ incentives to lobby in the United States, but the existing lobbying literature mostly ignores these incentives. Using lobbying records for all electric utilities in the United States from 1998 to 2012, we examine how state policies affect federal lobbying by both proponents and opponents of federal support for the renewable energy policy. Our theory predicts that supportive state policies reduce the returns to lobbying by both proponents and opponents. Empirically, we show that when the federal production tax credit for renewable energy is about to expire, electric utilities from states without renewable portfolio standards become more likely to lobby than those from states with these policies. Because the timing of the expiration of the production tax credit is quasi-random, these findings carry a causal interpretation. Using text analysis techniques, we also show that the lobbying efforts are focused on energy and environmental issues while lobbying on unrelated topics remains unaffected.

Women remain underrepresented in electoral politics compared to their share of the population. Using an original dataset spanning 1975–2019, we examine whether the presence of women in prominent political office leads to an increase in the number of women serving in state legislatures. We define prominence in two ways: the total number of women elected to statewide office and the length of a state’s history of electing women. We find that the prominence effect diverges by party. The election of prominent Democratic women leads to an increase in the proportion of Democratic women state legislators, while the election of Republican women leads to a decrease in the proportion of Republican women state legislators. Rather than serving as role models for women of both parties to enter the political pipeline, electing more women to prominent office is contributing to a greater representational gap between the parties in state legislatures.

Lines at the polls raise the cost of voting and can precipitate unequal treatment of voters. Research on voting lines is nonetheless hampered by a fundamental measurement problem: little is known about the distribution of time voters spend in line prior to casting ballots. We argue that early, in-person voter check-in times allow us identify individuals who waited in line to vote. Drawing on election administrative records from two General Elections in Florida—1,031,179 check-ins from 2012 and 1,846,845 from 2016—we find that minority voters incurred disproportionately long wait times in 2012 and that in-person voters who waited excessively in 2012 had a slightly lower probability—approximately one percent—of turning out to vote in 2016, ceteris paribus. These individuals also had slightly lower turnout probabilities in the 2014 Midterm Election, ceteris paribus. Our results draw attention to the ongoing importance of the administrative features of elections that influence the cost of voting and ultimately the extent to which voters are treated equally.

Can legislation encouraging women’s political involvement impact women’s desire to run for elected office? Eleven states have passed legislation to promote equal gender representation on appointed government boards, and many argue this legislation will also develop a pipeline of women candidates to run for elected office. This paper is the first scholarly work to assess if gender balance legislation (GBL) increases the number of women candidates and women legislators within a state. I use a nonparametric generalization of the difference-in-differences estimator and find very little evidence that GBL significantly impacts women’s representation at the state level. Results are consistent across multiple outcome variables and different model specifications, including two-way fixed effects, generalized synthetic control, and synthetic control models. The insignificant impact of GBL speaks to the need to thoroughly investigate which institutional reforms adequately feed the female candidate pipeline.

What is the role of legislative term limits in the structure of legislative institutions? Using Mooney’s collective action problem theoretical framework on legislative leadership power, I claim that legislative term limits should be a key determinant in a state Speaker’s power via the delegation of institutional tools that control the lawmaking process. Speakers can use these tools to influence policy outcomes and their colleagues. I test this expectation in an analysis of lower chamber rules in nearly all states between 1981 and 2015. The results indicate that states with implemented term limits are associated with a more powerful Speaker. These findings suggest that a more nuanced relationship between legislative term limits and leadership power exist than previously thought.

Scholars have argued that female legislators are more prone to collaborate than their male counterparts. Though collaboration may be more or less evident in particular situations, we seek to more clearly establish the mechanism behind women’s collaborative activity using the framework of marginalization. In this paper, we use cosponsorship data from 74 state legislative chambers from 2011–2014 to analyze collaborative patterns and mobilizing institutions. We find female legislators are more collaborative than men, and that their collaborative advantage strengthens in chambers where women are systematically excluded from leadership positions. The advantage also extends to bipartisan collaboration, but only in less polarized settings with women’s caucuses. Furthermore, our findings imply that as women are integrated into leadership collaboration will actually decline, especially within their own party. We believe these results are important for understanding both the roots of collaborative behavior among female legislators and consequences of chambers that marginalize women from leadership positions.

This study examines how state government responses to economic crisis, in the form of unexpected changes in state fiscal policy, influence income inequality. State governments are vital actors in times of fiscal stress as nearly every state must make difficult policy decisions related to taxes and spending to address budget deficits, both of which are policies that shape the income gap. Focusing on periods of fiscal stress is important for the study of state inequality as those with fewer resources are the most likely to experience the consequences of their state’s fiscal response during these times. Using time-series cross-sectional data, this research demonstrates that income inequality increases when states respond to economic crisis by relying on unexpected spending cuts. These effects tend to persist even after initial economic downturns. In addition, one individual-level implication of the aggregate relationship between state policy responses and inequality—that people will be worse off financially when their states emphasize budget cuts in response to economic decline—is assessed using several post–Great Recession surveys. The findings have implications for the future of inequality in the United States and provide potential paths for state fiscal reform.

Party competition is foundational to the study of modern politics, affecting outcomes as varied as policy choices, political participation, and the quality of representation. Scholars have long argued that increased levels of party competition are associated with more liberal policy making. By this logic, parties in close competition with one another try to expand their bases of support by catering to the desires of those who tend to abstain from the political process—the “have-nots.” We extend this classic hypothesis by examining the relationship between competition and policy liberalism over several decades, articulating and testing a theory that suggests that party competition relates differently to social and economic policy liberalism. We find robust evidence that increased competition has a positive relationship with economic policy liberalism, weaker evidence for a negative relationship between competition and social policy liberalism, and suggestive evidence that the direction and magnitudes of these relationships have changed over time.

Do state politicians reward school districts that vote in favor of the party in power more than school districts that vote in favor of the opposing party? With large shares of money at the state level to transfer to local governments and the ability to target core voters, it would seem likely that politicians would take advantage of the ability to distribute education funds. However, in understanding how states distribute education funds, little emphasis is given to partisan influences, particularly the congruence between local school districts and the state level. To test this, I collected data at the precinct level within each state and, using mapping software, spatially joined precinct boundaries to school district boundaries. Once this relationship was established, I aggregated precinct-level information to school districts to understand the partisan voting patterns within each school district for elections from 2000 to 2010. This article finds evidence that funding formulas are susceptible to political influence and that parties are able to influence the geographic distribution of education funds to core voters.

Recently, scholars of the lawmaking process have urged their colleagues to devote more attention to the potential impact of bill content on legislative outcomes. Heeding their call, this paper builds an original dataset of over 5,000 pieces of state-level legislation addressing issues that span the ideological spectrum. It compares proposals that challenge the authority of the national government in a specific domain to proposals that lack federalism-related implications and finds that the former, all else being equal, make less legislative progress toward enactment. In addition, it categorizes the measures that resist national laws based on the specific nature of the challenge they pose. Its analysis finds that measures that are inconsistent with existing national law but work within the law’s legal framework make more legislative progress than measures that seek to nullify the national law or that vow not to cooperate with it. It also confirms that sponsor characteristics such as majority status, the number of cosponsors, institutional rules such as hearing requirements, and state-level factors like party control of the state legislature affect how much progress proposals make toward enactment. Thus, the paper demonstrates the importance of legislative content as an explanatory factor and sheds light on the nature of intergovernmental relations in the contemporary United States.

What characteristics do state supreme court justices prioritize when choosing leaders? At the federal level, collegial court leaders are appointed or rotated by seniority. A plurality of states permit peer-vote selection, but the consequences of employing this mechanism are not well known. We develop a theory of chief justice selection emphasizing experience, bias, and politics. Leveraging within-contest variation and more than a half century’s worth of original contest data, we find that chief justice peer votes often default to seniority rotation. Ideological divergence from the court median, governor, and legislature is largely unassociated with selection. Justices who dissent more than their peers are, however, disadvantaged. We find no evidence of discrimination against women or people of color. The results have implications for policy debates about political leader selection.

In this article, we develop and make available measures of public ideology in 2010 for the 50 American states, 435 congressional districts, and state legislative districts. We do this using the geospatial statistical technique of Bayesian universal kriging, which uses the locations of survey respondents, as well as population covariate values, to predict ideology for simulated citizens in districts across the country. In doing this, we improve on past research that uses the kriging technique for forecasting public opinion by incorporating Alaska and Hawaii, making the important distinction between ZIP codes and ZIP Code Tabulation Areas, and introducing more precise data from the 2010 Census. We show that our estimates of ideology at the state, congressional district, and state legislative district levels appropriately predict the ideology of legislators elected from these districts, serving as an external validity check.

Does the partisanship of officeholders affect environmental outcomes? The popular perception is that Republicans are bad for the environment, but complicating factors like federalism may limit this outcome. Using a dataset that tracks toxic releases over 20 years, we examine how partisan control of executive and legislative branches at both state and federal levels affect environmental policy. Moving beyond the passage of policies or environmental program spending allows us to fully understand the impact of Republicans on the environment. In addition, we take into account structural complications that may shape the relationship between Republican control and environmental outcomes. We find that the conventional wisdom that Republicans are bad for the environment has some validity, but it is dependent on what offices Republican elected officials occupy. More specifically, Republicans significantly affect toxic chemical releases when occupying governorships and controlling Congress. Our conclusions provide further insight into understanding how partisanship affects environmental outcomes, including how partisanship composition across the federal system matters.

We utilize a new policy adoption database with over 500 policies to test whether the initiative process influences the timing of policy adoption. Prior studies have produced both supportive and null findings of the effect of the initiative, but typically examine policies one policy or a single composite score at a time. Theoretical accounts suggest that the initiative process should have heterogeneous effects on policy outcomes depending on the configuration of public and government preferences. By pooling hundreds of policies we are able to estimate the average effect of the initiative process on state policy adoption more systematically while also evaluating variation in its effect. We find via a pooled event history analysis that the initiative tends to increase innovativeness, but that this effect can be cancelled out by signature and distribution requirements. We find that this effect varies substantially across policies and is more consistently positive on average in states more liberal populations. We also find evidence that the initiative process moderates the effect of ideology on policy adoption, while making the adoption of non-ideological policies more likely on average.

In this paper, we analyze how variations in partisan representation across different levels of government influence Americans’ satisfaction with the democracy in the United States. We conduct two survey experiments and analyze data from the 2016 American National Election Study postelection survey. We find that Americans are the most satisfied with democracy when their most preferred party controls both the federal and their respective state governments. However, we also find that even if an individual’s least preferred party only controls one level of government, they are still more satisfied with democracy than if their most preferred party controls no levels of government. These findings suggest that competition in elections across both the national and state government, where winning and losing alternates between the two parties, may have positive outcomes for attitudes toward democracy.

The American states offer a wealth of variation across time and space to understand the sources, dynamics, and consequences of public policy. As laboratories of socioeconomic and political differences, they enable both wide-scale assessments of change and studies of specific policy choices. To leverage this potential, we constructed and integrated a database of thousands of state-year variables for designing and executing social research: the Correlates of State Policy Project (CSPP). The database offers one-stop shopping for accurate and reliable data, allows researchers to assess the generalizability of the relationships they uncover, enables assessment of causal inferences, and connects state politics researchers to larger research communities. We demonstrate CSPP’s use and breadth, as well as its limitations. Through an applied empirical approach familiar to the state politics literature, we show that researchers should remain attentive to regional variation in key variables and potential lack of within-state variation in independent and dependent variables of interest. By comparing commonly used model specifications, we demonstrate that results are highly sensitive to particular research design choices. Inferences drawn from state politics research largely depend on the nature of over time variation within and across states and the empirical leverage it may or may not provide.

Wrongful convictions are an increasing salient feature of criminal justice discourse in the United States. Many states have adopted reforms to mitigate the likelihood of wrongful convictions, discover errors, and provide redress in the wake of exonerations, yet we know little about why some are seemingly more committed to reducing such errors than others. We argue that public opinion is consequential for policy reform, but its effects are contingent on the electoral vulnerability of state lawmakers. We also suggest that advocacy organizations play a critical role in policy adoption. Incorporating data from all 50 states from 1989 to 2018, we investigate the adoption of five types of wrongful conviction reforms: (1) changes to eyewitness identification practices, (2) mandatory recording of interrogations, (3) the preservation of biological evidence, (4) access to postconviction DNA testing, and (5) exoneree compensation. Our results highlight a more nuanced view of how public opinion shapes policy.