In the summer 2006 edition of State Politics and Policy Quarterly, Michael Baranowski and Donald Gross examined two methods of measuring influence over state agency activities: freestanding versus paired comparison. Their analysis led them to conclude that the paired-comparison measures might be theoretically superior, but are often impractical. Using the American State Administrator Project (ASAP) surveys, we supplement Baranowski and Gross's analysis by identifying conditions that sometimes make freestanding instruments superior measures and, at other times, paired comparisons both superior and practical to use.

This article introduces a new, public database of U.S. state and local public policies, now available at www.statepolicyindex.com. The database covers more than 170 different state or local policies, coded at the state level as of December 31, 2006, in most cases. We use principal components analysis and derive two orthogonal measures of state policy ideology, which we label policy liberalism and policy urbanism. Our policy liberalism measure passes several reliability and validity checks, while policy urbanism is strongly predicted by urbanization rate, percentage of African Americans in the population, and percentage of Christian adherents in the population.