During the most recent round of redistricting, many states have enacted a number of reforms to their mapmaking practices. One reform that has received increased attention in recent years is a ban on prison gerrymandering—the practice of counting incarcerated individuals in prisons instead of their home addresses. Eleven states drew districts while counting incarcerated persons in their homes after the 2020 Census. Though substantial research has investigated redistricting practices, far less attention has been paid to empirically examining the effect of prison gerrymandering on elections. We seek to fill this void by evaluating the effect of New York’s ban on prison gerrymandering on state legislative elections between 2002 and 2020. We find that altering how the prison population is counted, indeed, altered the electoral dynamics across the state.

Do attempts to level the financial playing field lead more candidates to run for office? In theory, public financing should increase competition, presumably because additional funding from taxpayers motivates more challengers to run for office. I provide a novel test of this logic with data on all candidates running for state legislature across all US states between 1976 and 2018. The results suggest that public financing exerts a generally positive effect on the total number of candidates running for state legislative office and specifically increases the number of candidates running in elections for every additional year after the passage of public financing. This effect is amplified in states that offer greater amounts of public funds. I conclude that the availability of public financing can be an equalizing force in elections, and that state legislative elections continue to experience increased competition in the years after the introduction of public financing.

In this article, I present a theory of conditional core-swing targeting that focuses on the competition for majority control in legislative elections to explain how presidents use their strong budgetary powers to manipulate the distribution of the national subsidy in South Korea. Presidents whose parties already possess a legislative majority are expected to favor core municipalities to strengthen the foundations of their majority constituency, whereas those who seek majority control are predicted to prioritize swing municipalities in an effort to cross the majority threshold. Presidents are also anticipated to respond to the electoral cycle by shifting subsidies to riskier municipalities when elections approach. Using a novel data set on national subsidy allocations that spans three decades, I find evidence in favor of the hypotheses. This article demonstrates that the beneficiaries of distributive favoritism are not fixed, and that politicians can engage in complex and varied targeting strategies to achieve their objectives.

Political scientists have long been interested in studying the elective office-holding of disadvantaged groups. However, this line of research primarily focuses on the representation of ethnic minorities in the U.S. Congress and identifies three types of determinants of minority candidates' electoral success: the demographic and political make-up of constituents, candidates' personal traits, and macro-level electoral rules. Much less attention is given to minority candidates' electoral success in statehouses. In this paper, we ask: what factors promote the electoral success of minority candidates in state legislatures? Beyond voter characteristics and electoral rules, we attribute minority candidates' electoral success to the social capital possessed by their in-group constituents. We theorize that social capital manifested as civic engagement and social connectedness, can become political capital for minority candidates. Using the Current Population Surveys Civic Engagement Supplement, we validate state-level measures of social capital by race and ethnicity. Linking group social capital to state legislative election outcomes, we find the stock of minority social capital contributes to the electoral success of minority candidates, while white social capital decreases minority candidates' electoral success. Key findings suggest social capital is a form of political capital for disadvantaged groups with private benefits for in-group candidates.

Conventional wisdom holds that public campaign financing can diversify the socioeconomic makeup of candidate pools and, therefore, of U.S. elected officials, which could make U.S. public policy more responsive to lower socioeconomic status (SES) citizens. I argue that in addition to the absence of a positive relationship between public financing and candidate socioeconomic diversity, public financing, depending on the program design, may, in fact, reduce candidate socioeconomic diversity. Using occupational data on state legislative candidates in public financing state Connecticut and two paired control states to execute a difference in difference analysis, I demonstrate that when public financing is available, fewer low SES candidates run for state legislative office, and those who do run are not more likely to win and are less likely to utilize public financing.

Legislators might rely on their partisan base for electoral support—what scholars call their normal vote—or they may cultivate support among nonpartisans through casework or constituency service—what scholars call a personal vote. Previous research frequently argues that legislators face a tradeoff between pursuing the normal vote and a personal vote as traditionally defined, often focusing on resources used by incumbents to build their personal vote. In contrast, we argue that securing the support of partisans and nonpartisans alike should be evaluated based on how a legislator performs in office, and that the so-called normal and personal vote need not be viewed as in conflict. We evaluate our claims using data from state legislative elections following redistricting, focusing on legislative professionalism to measure the resources available to incumbents that they might use to cultivate a personal note.

According to reformers, legislative term limits should increase voter turnout by enhancing electoral competitiveness for legislative seats. However, this claim has been largely untested. The only existing study of the effect of legislative term limits on voter turnout, to date, finds that turnout in California did not increase after the imposition of term limits and may have decreased turnout. Yet, it is unclear whether this result generalizes to other states. This study employs a comparative state analysis of both aggregate turnout and district-level turnout rates in state legislative elections. We find that term limits significantly increase voting rates in state legislative elections.

Why are fewer congressional elections competitive at the district level when the national electoral environment is at its most competitive? This article explores this “pseudoparadox,” and argues that the answer can be found in partisan redistricting. Through an analysis of 40 years of congressional elections, I find that partisan gerrymanders induce greater competitiveness as national tides increase, largely due to unanticipated consequences of waves adverse to the map-drawing party, particularly in seats held by that party. The phenomenon anecdotally coined by Grofman and Brunell as the “dummymander” is thus actually quite common and has significant effects on rates of congressional competition nationally. In contrast, bipartisan maps are shown to induce lower competition, while nonpartisan maps induce higher competition, under all electoral conditions and competitiveness measures. But the effects of partisan gerrymanders on competition, though strong, can only be seen in interaction with short-term national forces.

This article examines the relationship between party competition for control of governing institutions and legislative party polarization. Although the competition/cohesion thesis dates to the 1940s, it has never before been subject to a test with data from the 50 states. Drawing upon newly available data, we take stock of the evidence. Five measures of party competition are used: (1) the number of recent shifts of party control, (2) an index of party competition for state offices, (3) the closeness of presidential elections in the state, (4) the effective number of political parties in the state, and (5) the ratio of Republicans to Democrats in the electorate. Nearly all of these measures correlate with higher levels of party polarization in both the lower and upper chambers, and none are associated with a lower level of polarization.

Despite a long history of nonpartisanship, the Nebraska state legislature has polarized rapidly within the past decade. Using interviews and campaign finance records, we examine politics in the modern Unicam to investigate nonpartisan polarization. We find that newly instituted term limits created opportunities for the state's political parties to recruit and finance candidates in an increasingly partisan fashion. Social network analysis suggests that there is a growing level of structure to campaign donations, with political elites increasingly less likely to contribute across party lines. The results offer a compelling example of parties overcoming institutions designed to eliminate them.

State legislative elections are increasingly shaped by two factors that influence the prospects of winning a majority: the redistricting cycle and partisan tide elections. Winning control of the redistricting process offers the prospect of shaping elections for the next decade, making majority status significantly more valuable than it otherwise might be. Partisan tides, on the contrary, can dramatically alter perceptions of which seats are safe or vulnerable and of whether majority status is obtainable or not. In this article, I examine how the proximity of redistricting and the presence of partisan tides are reflected in the strategies of the party organizations that contest state legislative elections. Using party finance data from 29 states during the period from 1996 to 2010, I find that parties' majority-seeking behavior is more intense in states with legislative redistricting, when redistricting is imminent, and when partisan tides favor the minority party.

Previous research has largely concluded that House elections have become less competitive in the modern era. Our research examines one area where we expect to observe more competition—namely, primary elections. In this article, we investigate when and where a state legislator will emerge to run in a congressional primary. All else equal, we expect that state legislators who can carry a large portion of their old state reelection constituency to the “geographic” congressional constituency will be more likely to emerge and receive a higher vote share in the election. Using geographic information systems (GIS) techniques, we are able to derive a measure of constituency congruency by focusing on the degree of intersection between state legislative and congressional districts. Our results indicate that state legislators are more likely to emerge in a primary if constituency congruency is high, especially in open seat contests. Congruency does not appear to provide an electoral advantage at the polls.

In Illinois and Texas, senate elections return members to serve terms of different length. Because term length schedules are randomized, these states provide a natural experiment. Cross-sectional comparison of chambers requires statistical controls for myriad factors that distinguish cases (chambers or periods). These two chambers, by contrast, produce direct evidence of term length's impact on electoral behavior. We test hypotheses about term length's impact on candidacies, campaign expenditures, and voter participation with data from 1968 to 2010. Surprisingly, there is little evidence of any significant differences between contests for two-year and four-year terms.