Political scientists have long distinguished between incremental and non-incremental policymaking. In this study, I illustrate the relevance of this distinction for comparative state policy research by modeling both incremental and non-incremental change in the same policy area: Medicaid nursing facility reimbursement. I use mixed-modeling techniques to model incremental year-to-year changes in per diem rates and payments per recipient and event history analysis and ordered logit to model non-incremental comprehensive innovation in this policy area. My results indicate that federal action prompted non-incremental change in capital reimbursement policy by limiting state discretion over incremental year-to-year spending decisions. Incremental policy appears to be affected by regional diffusion, but there is no evidence of this effect for non-incremental policy. Furthermore, when a state's fiscal health declined and the demand for government services grew, it was more likely to respond by making incremental adjustments than non-incremental system overhauls. Whereas governing capacity influenced both incremental and non-incremental change, state ideology influenced only incremental change. The rate at which states pursue incremental or non-incremental policy change depends on their relative vulnerability to federal policy changes, their receptivity to neighboring state influences, and their susceptibility to internal political, economic, and programmatic conditions.

Previous tests of theories of legislative committee development have relied on floor behavior and votes, data which is one step removed from committee behavior itself. I test these prominent theories of committees by looking directly at legislative behavior in committee. I examine the patterns of committee votes in the 2000-01 sessions of the California Legislature to assess the distributive, informational, and partisan theories of committee development. I find some support for all three theories, leading me to conclude that committee behavior varies across time and issue.

What is the impact of a legislature's institutions on the representational roles its members adopt? We address this question by examining the role orientation of state legislators in eight states, explaining why some legislators identify more with a trustee model of representation and others identify more with the delegate model. Using ordinal logistic regression analysis on data from a survey of 447 legislators, we test for the effects of multimember districts and term limits, along with several other factors. First, we find that representational roles and behavior are related; legislators who think of themselves as delegates are much more likely to hold frequent district office hours than their counterparts who think of themselves as trustees. Second, we find that, overall, legislators are more likely to consider themselves trustees than delegates. Third, we find that multimember districts and term limits increase the likelihood that legislators think of themselves as trustees. Thus, legislative institutions can influence the representational roles legislators adopt.

The effect of campaign contributions on legislative roll call voting has long been the subject of debate. This study weighs into this debate by examining the impact of teachers' union contributions on votes on two school choice bills in the Florida House of Representatives during the 1998 and 1999 sessions. I find that different types of school choice bills evince different effects of campaign contributions from teachers' unions. Specifically, campaign contributions appear to influence voting on bills that are most important to a group's policy agenda but have no effect on bills more peripheral to their interests. Additionally, legislators receiving campaign contributions from teachers' unions were significantly more likely to vote against vouchers than against charter schools, even after controlling for other influences on their votes.

The valid and reliable measurement of perceived influence over executive agencies is vital to understanding bureaucratic behavior. Using a survey of 540 state agency heads in 15 states, we evaluate two such measures—a standard free-standing measure and a paired-comparison measure—in terms of conceptual clarity, theoretical utility, and susceptibility to systematic measurement error. Our results indicate that while a paired-comparison measure may be theoretically superior to a free-standing measure, missing responses, intransitivities, and respondent fatigue make the paired-comparison method less practical.