We examine the influence of national politics and changing racial demographics on school board elections. We identify the districts where candidates campaigned on Critical Race Theory, COVID response, or parent control/transparency (what we call “conflict elections”) and examine two related questions. First, what characteristics define school districts that had elections involving these issues? Second, in the places that had conflict elections, how frequently did “conflict candidates” win, and what factors influenced their odds of winning? Utilizing a unique dataset of all school board elections in Wisconsin in 2022, we find that Republican presidential vote share is positively related to both the probability that a school district had a conflict election and that a conflict candidate won. We also find that in communities where the white population declined between 2010 and 2020, there was a higher likelihood that a conflict candidate won compared to communities where the size of the white population grew. Overall, our analysis confirms that school board elections are increasingly mirroring nationalized trends in other elections.

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.

Scholarly research finds that partisan, hard-fought, expensive, and churlish state supreme court campaigns increase voter participation and their support for challenger candidates. These insights, however, are drawn nearly exclusively from competitive state supreme court elections. Little is known about voter behavior in uncompetitive retention elections. Traditionally, these races are not salient to the public given that incumbents raise and spend little-to-no money, and campaigns, parties, and political action committees air few (if any) advertisements. Since 2010, however, such behavior has become more commonplace. I assess voter participation and incumbent performance in 178 state supreme court retention elections from 2002 to 2014. I find that expensive, churlish retention elections are likely to increase voter turnout and to hurt incumbents' efforts to win retention.

Most studies of amicus influence in both federal and state courts assume that the information provided in these briefs is the mechanism through which amici influence court outcomes. However, the question of how individual state supreme court judges respond to this third-party information and whether or not judicial responses are conditioned by differing methods of judicial retention is rarely theorized. Using social-psychological theories of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, this article investigates how ideological predispositions and electoral institutions structure the responsiveness of state high-court judges to amicus brief information. Utilizing an original dataset of more than 14,000 votes of state high-court judges across three distinct areas of law, this article tests competing theories of amicus influence to determine how state high-court judges utilize amicus information to render judicial decisions. Results are generally supportive of the informational theory of amicus influence in complex areas of law. However, a conditioning relationship of retention method suggests that competitive elections may alter the mechanism of amicus brief influence such that judicial responsiveness to third-party briefs is more closely tied to the reelection and campaign fundraising considerations of individual judges in politically contentious areas of law.

While a large body of research exists regarding the role of industry money on roll-call voting in the U.S. Congress, there is surprisingly little scholarship pertaining to industry influence on state politics. This study fills this void in an analysis of campaign donations and voting during passage of Act 13 in Pennsylvania during 2011 and 2012. After collecting information about natural gas production in state legislative districts, we estimate a series of multivariate models aimed at uncovering whether campaign donations contributed to a more favorable policy outcome for industry. Our findings indicate that campaign donations played a small but systematic role in consideration of the controversial legislation, which represented one of the first and most important state-level regulatory reforms for the hydraulic fracturing industry.

Can politically polarizing events bear dividends for extremist lawmakers? Evidence from California legislative financial disclosures suggests they can. During the state's numerous budget shutdowns of the last 30 years, extremist legislators outside their party median could expect greater fund-raising hauls than their more centrist counterparts. The results suggest that polarizing events such as California's perennial budget impasses can make extremist positions more appealing to the polarized political elites who generally fund political campaigns. Regardless of the motivation, however, these results suggest a strong incentive to prolong political discord by extremists—a troubling outcome in cases where supermajority votes are required.

Two very different kinds of models—cross-sectional models based on the logic of island biogeography and time series models of density dependence—are used to understand interest system density. While they share much in common, it is not at all clear how results derived from cross-sectional models are to be understood in terms of the temporal focus of the time series approach. Thus, the first purpose of this article is to more thoroughly think through how these two modeling strategies and their empirical findings are related to each other. We empirically assess several theoretical conjectures about the relationship of the two modeling strategies by adding a temporal element to the typical cross-sectional analysis of state interest systems via modeling density dependence pooled across four cross-sections from 1980, 1990, 1997, and 2007. By doing so, we add to the literature on state interest system density by examining how it has changed since 1980. Finally, we discuss the nature of this change and what it implies for the temporal development of state interest communities, the second focus of this analysis.

Recently, many U.S. states that allow citizen initiatives have passed laws designed to make it more difficult for an initiative to qualify for the ballot (e.g., by increasing the number of signatures required to get on the ballot), thereby making it harder for citizens to bypass the legislature and make direct changes to public policy. Such laws have reduced both the number of measures that make the ballot and the number that pass on Election Day. I show that laws governing access of initiatives to the ballot also shape the policy agenda; provisions making it harder for proposals to get on the ballot decrease the complexity of the initiatives on the ballot. As less complex initiatives are more likely to be understood by voters and voters are reluctant to vote for measures they do not understand, more restrictive laws actually increase the likelihood that an initiative will pass.