The impact of U.S. Supreme Court decisions is contingent on the willingness of other political actors to implement those decisions. One important group of implementers is the U.S. state legislatures. However, in the pursuit of policy, state legislators must consider multiple goals when choosing among alternative policy options. In addition to considering the likelihood of review by state high courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, state legislators have their own ideas about good policy and must also face reelection. When are legislators likely to follow precedent and when are they likely to ignore it in pursuit of these other goals? In this article, I examine the enactment of state minimum wage legislation for women in the first half of the twentieth century. The results show that even after controlling for legislative and constituent preferences, legislators heed the preferences of the U.S. Supreme Court—but not necessarily their own high courts—when deciding to pass minimum wage legislation. The results point to the need for scholars of state politics to pay greater attention to the role of judicial actors when studying policy adoption and legislative behavior.

Although political parties in U.S. legislatures cannot compel discipline with the threat of expulsion from the legislature, they can encourage greater party loyalty by strategically bestowing benefits upon favored members. This article explores the use of plum committee assignments to encourage legislators' loyalty to their parties. I outline a theory of how party leaders can use committee assignments strategically to encourage more loyal legislative behavior. This occurs when legislative rules meet two criteria: (1) parties and their leaders can determine who serves on committees and (2) committees have real authority over policy outcomes. I test the theory using data from five state legislatures that differ on the relevant set of legislative rules, finding more party loyalty shown by legislators who receive plum committee assignments when rules meet both criteria and no effect when they do not.

We consider the impact of direct democracy on state public policy by examining whether initiatives alter the effects of predictors in models of general state policy liberalism. These analyses are couched in Erikson, Wright, and McIver's (1993) opinion liberalism model of state public policy, as augmented by Gray et al.'s (2004) inclusion of measures of organized interests. After presenting our theoretical expectations, we test the different ways that public opinion, organized interests, and initiatives can interact in the determination of public policy with a variety of models. We find little evidence that initiatives alter the congruence between opinion and policy.

In order to understand what factors drive child welfare policymaking, this research analyzes data on spending and legislation from the U.S. states over a three-year period. The key independent variables are scandal, litigation, federal oversight, and local discretion. While states that experience a scandal or a lawsuit do not increase their spending levels over previous years, they do enact more child welfare legislation. This raises the possibility that states engage in symbolic rather than substantive responses to child welfare crises. The administrative structure of the child welfare system also affects state policymaking.

Roll-call data have become a staple of contemporary scholarship on legislative behavior. Recent methodological innovations in the analysis of roll-call data have produced a number of important theoretical insights, such as understanding the structure of congressional decisionmaking and the role of parties and ideology in Congress. Many of the methodological innovations and theoretical questions sparked by congressional scholarship have been difficult to test at the state level because of the lack of comprehensive data on various forms of state legislative behavior, including roll-call voting. The Representation in America's Legislatures project rectifies that problem through collection of comprehensive state legislative roll-call votes across all 99 state legislative chambers for the 1999–2000 and 2003–04 legislative sessions. In this article, we describe the data available through this project as well as our data acquisition procedures, including Stata and Perl programming and OCR of paper documents, with suggestions about how to use these methods to collect a wide range of state-level data.