Conventional wisdom suggests that incumbent politicians use the resources of office to create an electoral advantage. But Cox and Katz (2002) argue that at least part of this incumbency advantage in the United States House of Representatives can be attributed to the strategic entry and exit decisions of incumbents. We test this claim by taking advantage of the natural experiment provided by state legislative term limits in California. By comparing different types of open seats, we identify the strategic component of the incumbency advantage that exists above and beyond the resource-based advantage. The vote loss suffered by the incumbent party is smaller in term-limited seats than in voluntary open seats, indicating that incumbents do sometimes leave when their electoral prospects look dim. Further evidence of this strategic component is that quality challengers run more often in voluntary open seats, while quality incumbent-party replacements run disproportionately in term-limited seats.

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.

Most studies of the effects of term limits on state legislators' careers have focused solely on their propensity to seek other offices. An expected-utility analysis of the decision to run for office indicates that term limits reduce the benefits of seeking reelection, even for state legislators who are eligible to run, and reduce the opportunity cost of running for other offices. From this analysis, I develop a series of hypotheses about the probability that state legislators—term-limited or not—will seek re-election or other offices under a term limits regime, the value of the offices they seek, and the probability with which they will win these contests. I test these hypotheses using data on the career choices of state legislators in states with and without term limits in 2000-02. My empirical analysis supports the rational entry model and indicates that term limits have had a much richer effect on state legislative careers than previously understood.

Political scientists have increasingly viewed party activists as important catalysts for party behavior and change in American politics. Understanding the decisionmaking norms of these activists should help inform scholars' broader understanding of party performance. We examine the norms of party decisionmaking expressed by a select group of party activists: delegates to both parties' 2000 national conventions. We focus on how state contextual factors shape the norms these activists hold regarding the proper balance between ideological purity and the pragmatic pursuit of electoral success. The contextual factors we consider include the rules for delegate selection, the financial capacity of state parties, electoral competitiveness between the two parties, party polarization, and state political culture. We find evidence that norms respond as expected to some elements of state party context, but not to others.

By truncating service, term limits create massive turnover in some state legislatures where they exist, bringing flocks of newcomers into office. With less time to get to know each other and to develop expertise and influence, how do legislators know who to consult and whose advice to rely on? We explore this and other questions about three relationships (influence, friendship, and policy consultation) with a longitudinal study of the Michigan House of Representatives, a highly professionalized body with stringent limits on legislative terms. We found that term limits lead to a more pronounced regional component of friendship, greater concentration of influence among caucus leaders, consulting networks with more prominent hubs that could control the flow of information, and a decline in relationships across party lines. We argue that these effects of term limits bode poorly for bipartisan negotiation and consensus-building among legislators representing diverse constituencies.

The controversial presidential election of 2000 triggered a wide variety of electoral reforms in many states. We examine the impact of a state's politics, ethnicity, and fiscal health on the passage of these reforms. Using state-level data from 2001 and 2002, we find that the partisan make-up of state government frequently influenced the fate of these reforms. States with a divided government or high party competition tended not to adopt several key electoral reforms, while partisanship and the interaction of partisanship and minority representation influenced the adoption of others. Fiscal constraints and institutional arrangements had less impact on reform adoption. Overall, our findings suggest that electoral reforms were shaped more by political factors than by fiscal concerns or any objective need for reform.

Over the past 20 years, nearly every major city in the United States has faced making the decision of whether to build a new stadium or other professional sports facility. In this period, 41 referendums have been held to authorize the public financing of such a facility. Previous studies have demonstrated that elite endorsements affect referendum voters, but these studies have not differentiated the effects of different kinds of elites on public support. We examine the differing effects of the support and opposition of elected officials, business groups, minority leaders, and community groups when modeling referendum outcomes. Our analysis reveals that among these elites' cues, opposition by elected officials (either Republican or Democratic) has the greatest effect on the final referendum vote and that the size of the public subsidy has a significant influence on public support. We also find evidence that opposition by elected officials is exogenous to public opinion.

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.

What effect do political leaders have on policy adoption in response to a crisis? The vote-counting crisis in the presidential election in Florida in 2000 forced policymakers in all 50 states to re-examine their own election laws and procedures. Some state leaders acted as entrepreneurs, seizing the opportunity to advance major reform, while others sought only modest or no substantive change. We test the impact of political leadership on policy adoption in a crisis situation by constructing a leadership variable from content analysis of news coverage in the states. We find that the activities of elected or appointed policymakers, particularly the states' chief elections officials (CEOs), had a decisive effect on the extent of election reforms adopted by the states. Five other factors also affected the adoption of election reforms: political culture, the ideology of a state's electorate, recommendations by statewide commissions, legislative term limits, and the interaction between the winner's margin of victory in the 2000 presidential election and the state's residual vote rate.

In November 1996, voters cast ballots for candidates running for 57 seats on 15 community advising and zoning boards in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Voters had little knowledge about the candidates or the boards that had been created only a few months earlier. The candidates campaigned for seven weeks. The local media generally ignored them. There were no incumbents and no party labels in the non-partisan contests. In low-information local elections such as these, voter cues and ballot design plays a decisive role in voter choice. The cues in this election were candidates' gender, ethnicity, campaign expenditures, and ballot position. Our results indicate that the most important cue was candidate gender; however, voters used ethnicity to decide whether they voted for men or women. The number of candidates on the ballot impacted vote share, while ballot position played no significant role. Those candidates who spent the most campaign money were also preferred. We argue that vote cues provide a means to address voter fatigue, where gender, ethnicity, and name recognition provide cues in this low-information, high voter fatigue situation. Our results suggest that by spending greater on their campaigns, Hispanic women—the most disadvantaged of the candidates—could run competitively against Hispanic men.

Do term limits constrain a legislature's ability to produce complex and broad policy? I investigate this question by examining patterns of policymaking in six states before and after term limits went into effect in four of them. I find that term limits reduced policy complexity in three hybrid and citizen legislatures, while laws became increasingly intricate in the highly professional California legislature. I conclude that both the institutional context and experience of the term-limited legislators condition the effects of this reform on policymaking. In particular, a legislator's experience—in either state or local government—allows him or her to write broad and complex bills, and in legislatures that provide little staff support to compensate for the inexperience of their new members, term limits can reduce overall legislative policy knowledge, thus reducing the complexity of legislation.

Fiorina (1992, 1994) argued that increased professionalism of state legislatures in the 1970s and 1980s increased Democratic control of those bodies. While some subsequent empirical studies have been consistent with this hypothesis, doubt remains about the causal connection of this relationship. Our review of Fiorina's theoretical argument leads us to add legislative district size as a conditioning element to the model. Using data from state legislatures in 1960-98, we find that such a model supports the claim that the empirical connection between legislative professionalism and Democratic electoral success is causal and not spurious.

One of the oldest and most distinctive characteristics of American political culture is its anti-government, anti-politician bias. One manifestation of this attitude in state government today is the effort to maintain part-time “citizen” legislatures, whether through term limits, low salaries, or session length restrictions. But, realistically, how part-time is the job of a state legislator? We discuss findings from a national survey of state legislators in which they report spending more time on the job than one might anticipate given the presumably part-time nature of many state legislatures. As expected, we find that legislators serving in bodies characterized as full-time, professional legislatures spend more time on the job than those in part-time institutions, but we also see significant variation across states in both groups. We also find considerable variation among individual legislators, which is related to factors such as holding a leadership position and a legislator's demographic characteristics. We also show how time on the job is allocated among specific components of representation.

Do term limits affect the probability that an incumbent state legislator will run for the United States Congress? The theory of strategic politicians suggests that by reducing legislators' opportunity costs of running for higher office, term limits should push some legislators into congressional campaigns they would have foregone had a long-term legislative career been an option. To test this hypothesis, I analyze data from congressional elections held from 1992 through 2004 in the 15 states where term limits were operative in 2004. I find that sitting state legislators who have hit the limit of their state legislative service are more likely to run for Congress than those who are eligible to serve additional terms, whether those terms are limited or not. However, there is no statistically significant difference between the congressional-candidacy rates of legislators whose re-election eligibility is limited, but not exhausted, and legislators whose terms are not limited. By increasing the supply of experienced challengers, term limits may increase competition in elections for non-term-limited offices and, consequently, the quality of representation provided by those elected.

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.

In recent years, scholars of applied public policy have published a growing number of studies regarding state tobacco policymaking. This article analyzes the research findings, data sources, and methodological approaches of this applied and theoretical policy research, including numerous comprehensive state tobacco policymaking studies analyzing issues such as youth access enforcement, tobacco taxes, anti-tobacco education efforts, and clean indoor air programs. Other studies have focused on individual policymaking instruments designed to address state tobacco control issues, including tort reform, tobacco listed as a cause of death on death certificates, tobacco sampling, promotion and advertising restrictions, and fire-safe cigarettes. This wealth of research into tobacco policymaking has contributed significantly to our understanding of federalism, policy diffusion, and iron triangles and issue networks.

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.

Committees became a vital component of the decisionmaking process in most legislative bodies around the world during the 20th century. However, very little is known about how their status evolved. In particular, the complexity of, and variation among, committee systems have made it difficult for researchers to assess fully their role in lawmaking. We present a way to measure the structural nature of committee power in state legislatures in the United States, providing data rating 33 upper and lower chambers on six dimensions of committee power based on various legislative documents for 10 legislative sessions during the 20th century. Our method of measurement and these data should help researchers to better understand the evolution of legislative committee systems.

The article assesses two predictions made by term limits advocates: that term limits would increase electoral competition and enhance demographic representation in state legislatures. Although term limits may indeed have these consequences in some places and some times, their early effects in Florida do not provide support for these predictions. Our analysis suggests that state legislative seats that have opened up as the result of term limits yielded races with no smaller margins of victory than in previous elections, nor were they more likely to be contested by the two major political parties. Likewise, we found no significant increase in the representation of minorities or women in the Florida State Legislature after term limits.