Inequality in political participation is a well-known and often studied feature of American politics. An important study examining misreporting of voter turnout in opinion surveys, however, calls into question the true extent of participation inequality. Ansolabehere and Hersh's first-ever 50-state vote validation project shows that those with more political resources are more likely to misreport turnout. That is, those with higher incomes are more likely than others to report that they had voted when in fact they did not. These findings suggest that income disparities in participation are not as large as opinion surveys have led us to believe. Moreover, studies using differences between voters and nonvoters as a key political indicator may also be biased. This article presents the first assessment of whether vote misreporting creates systematic bias in measures of state participation inequality. An index of economic inequality in participation for the 50 states is developed using the Ansolabehere and Hersh validated vote data and compares the measure of political inequality with a similar measure using traditional (i.e., nonvalidated) survey data. These state indices are used to determine the extent of bias produced by misreporting and whether this bias has implications for studies using these measures of participation inequality. The latter is assessed by examining the influence of the self-reported and validated inequality measures on state welfare programs and minimum wage policy.

By using American state-level data from 1999 to 2008, this article explores how the recent immigrant influx has influenced public welfare spending in the American states. By integrating the race/ethnicity and globalization compensation theory, I hypothesize that immigration will increase welfare spending in states with a bleak job market and exclusive state immigrant welfare policy; in contrast, immigration will decrease welfare spending in states with a good job market and inclusive state immigrant welfare policy. Empirical tests show evidence for both hypotheses, suggesting that the applicability of general political science theories depends on a combination of state policy and economic contexts.

Many important traits of state legislatures vary across chambers within a state. Yet according to existing typologies in the comparative study of bicameralism, the 49 bicameral American state legislatures would be deemed quite homogeneous. To resolve this disjuncture, I identify a novel dimension of bicameralism that distinguishes among state legislatures by capturing the extent to which the two chambers serve as meaningfully different venues for influence. Based on this framework, I develop an index of bicameral “distinctiveness” rooted in three traits that speak to policy influence across chambers: the ratio of seats, bipartisan representation, and constituency dissimilarity. This measure reveals sizable variation across states and a conspicuous geographic pattern, with considerably greater bicameral distinctiveness in the Eastern United States. In turn, I assess the construct validity of this measure, showing how patterns of second chamber bill amendment vary systematically with the level of bicameral distinctiveness.

The examination of the interaction between the institutions in American state politics has long suffered from a dearth of data. This is the case despite the importance of understanding the separation of powers in the states and the specific effects on policy making and policy outcomes. In this article, I introduce a new, original dataset of court-curbing introductions by state legislators. The data include information on more than 1,200 state legislative bills that would restrict the power of the courts. In this article, I provide descriptive statistics for the data, employ the data to test hypotheses, and explain how this data may be used in future scholarly research on the interactions between state legislators and state courts.

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.

This article examines candidates' perceptions of political party services provided in state legislative campaigns using survey data from seven states in 1994. I find that candidates generally do not feel that party assistance is very helpful, although multivariate analyses show that this varies systematically with state context and district-level competition. The influence of campaign financing on candidate perceptions is particularly important. In districts where candidates spend similar amounts on their campaigns, candidates believe parties provide greater assistance. My findings suggest that parties target campaign services to candidates in the same way that they target financial contributions, focusing on districts where these resources are most likely to affect the election outcome.

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.

What happens after longstanding policies are overthrown in fierce political battles, events scholars refer to as punctuated equilibrium? Do these new policies remain static and unchanging until the next big punctuation, or do they continue to change in explainable and predictable ways? In this article, we develop a model of postpunctuation policy change grounded in theories of boundedly rational decision-making by policymakers. Uncertain about how well the new policy will perform, policymakers learn to rely on competing interest groups for information or, under certain circumstances, look to other political jurisdictions for cues on how their policies ought to be further refined. We test our predictions by studying changes in state charter school laws from 1996 to 2014. We find evidence of policy change, and even convergence, across states suggesting that policies after punctuation do change in ways explained as reactions to political pressures in an environment fraught with uncertainty.

Scholars posit that groups play an important role in the legislative process and legislator decision making, but find these questions difficult to empirically study due to the private information exchanges. This article exploits a legislative reporting institution to explore group involvement in policy making. In the California state legislature, extra-legislative individuals or organizations that write legislation and secure a legislator to author the bill may be listed as sponsors. Data come from California bill analyses and extend from 1993 to 2014. This group tactic is frequently used: 40% of bills introduced and over 60% of bills that become law list an extra-legislative sponsor. Group sponsorship is significantly related to passage, even after matching on a number of covariates. Legislators use fewer group bills and substitute out of group bills as they gain experience. Group input serves as an integral part of a legislative portfolio and the agenda-setting stage of legislative decision making.

This study seeks to explain state adoptions of same-day registration (SDR), with a focus on determining whether the Democratic (Republican) Party’s support of (resistance to) this impactful voting reform is driven by strategic electoral considerations. I find that states have an increased probability of enacting the reform when legislative Democrats are in the precarious position that comes with having just experienced minority status in one or both chambers. Relatedly, I demonstrate that the presence of a Republican legislature does not make adoption less likely until the size of the Black population reaches a certain threshold. In fact, provided the Black population is small enough, Republican control of the legislature encourages reform. The results offer conflicting evidence, however, that large Latino populations deter the GOP from establishing SDR. Considered together, the results cast doubt on the claim that either party’s position is informed by principle alone.

Communication is a fundamental step in the process of political representation, and an influential stream of research hypothesizes that male and female politicians talk to their constituents in very different ways. To build the broad dataset necessary for this analysis, we harness the massive trove of communication by American politicians through Twitter. We adopt a supervised learning approach that begins with the hand coding of over 10,000 tweets and then use these to train machine learning algorithms to categorize the full corpus of over three million tweets sent by the lower house state legislators who were serving in the summer of 2017. Our results provide insights into politicians’ behavior and the consequence of women’s underrepresentation on what voters learn about legislative activity.

Although significant research has been conducted on economic voting in gubernatorial elections, very few explore the impact of state fiscal conditions in these elections. The little that has been done yields conflicting results regarding the effects of state spending and found that governors are not held responsible for a state's overall fiscal health. Our study examines the impact of spending and fiscal health on gubernatorial elections from 1982 to 2013. We find evidence that voters reward incumbent parties for fiscal health and spending growth and that unified government and stronger executive budget powers enhance fiscal accountability for these outcomes. These findings contradict previous research that suggests voters punish one or both parties for higher spending. We conclude by discussing the implications of this research for the debate about the balance of powers between the executive and legislative branches.

This article compares three approaches to handling missing data at the state level under three distinct conditions. Using Monte Carlo simulation experiments, I compare the results from a linear model using listwise deletion (LD), Markov Chain Monte Carlo with the Gibbs sampler algorithm (MCMC), and multiple imputation by chained equations (MICE) as approaches to dealing with different severity levels of missing data: missing completely at random (MCAR), missing at random (MAR), and nonignorable missingness (NI). I compare the results from each of these approaches under each condition for missing data to the results from the fully observed dataset. I conclude that the MICE algorithm performs best under most missing data conditions, MCMC provides the most stable parameter estimates across the missing data conditions (but often produced estimates that were moderately biased), and LD performs worst under most missing data conditions. I conclude with recommendations for handling missing data in state-level analysis.

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.

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.

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.

Interest groups have many tactics to choose from in pursuing their policy goals. While inside tactics have received considerable scholarly attention, outside tactics have been adopted increasingly by groups of all kinds. We explore one such lobbying tactic by examining the relationship between interest groups and journalists in the American states. Through a survey of statehouse reporters, we find that lobbyists are useful sources of information for these reporters, who even rank them above many more traditional sources of information. Our data also show that contact between interest groups and journalists varies systematically across the states. Specifically, interest groups in states with large or small numbers of interest groups have more contact with journalists than interest groups in states with an average number of groups. Furthermore, journalists in states where interest groups are relatively powerful claim to interact with those groups less than journalists in states where interest groups are less powerful.

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.

While many scholars and analysts have observed a decline in civility in recent years, there have been few examinations of how political, economic, and institutional structures may partially explain inter-state differences in these trends. We suggest three potential explanations: (1) institutional structures, such as legislative professionalism and gubernatorial power, have created different contexts in which legislators build and maintain inter-personal relationships; (2) partisan competition has led to less bipartisan cooperation and contributed to strained relationships between members of different parties; and, (3) economic inequity and change has contributed to economic anxiety among citizens, contributing to conflict in legislative bodies as elected officials attempt to navigate emerging policy challenges. To test these explanations, we develop an innovative measure of civility using a national survey of lobbyists and a partial Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP) design. Findings suggest that there is some validity to all three explanations, and signifying that civility is at least partially a result of structural issues.

The power of conference committees is well documented and studied by scholars of the US Congress. But little is known about politics of bicameral agreement within state legislatures. Leveraging variation across states, I explore the conditions under which legislative leaders prefer formal bicameral conference negotiations to informal talks to reach final legislative agreements. Deploying an original dataset of state legislative decisions between 2005 and 2018, I find that ideologically cohesive majority parties favor the use of conferences, disproportionately relying on them to reconcile bicameral differences on salient measures. Majority parties, however, refrain from going to conference in those assemblies that empower the minority party to select its preferred conferees. The interaction of chamber rules and partisan dynamics thus shapes the contours of legislative agreements in systematic ways across the states.