Building upon existing theories of political fundraising and citizen participation in elections, this study examines contributions from individuals as an essential form of political participation in state high court elections from 2000 through 2012. Specifically, I explore the degree to which candidate characteristics, state political environments, and the attributes of state institutions affect the size of individual contributions. The findings of this investigation indicate the participation of contributors in judicial elections closely resembles the activities of voters. Like voters, contributors respond to contextual forces that increase or decrease salience and the political information available to state citizens. Of particular importance are state decisions to use partisan or nonpartisan election designs. Decisions by states to use partisan elections have important consequences for the generosity of contributors with larger donations directed to candidates seeking office in the most professionalized elective state supreme courts.

This article provides a new measure of state-level attitudes toward gender roles. Our series, gender equality mood, spans from 1972 to 2010 and is the first measure to capture variation in gender-role attitudes across states and over time. The series is created using two leading techniques for opinion estimation: multilevel regression and poststratification and survey aggregation. We conclude by discussing several research areas in which our measure of gender equality mood may be especially useful.

This article demonstrates how the party identification of various demographic groups in California and Texas changed in response to the gubernatorial campaigns of Pete Wilson and George W. Bush. Using aggregated time series of Field Poll, Texas Poll, and Gallup data, difference-in-differences results show that Wilson's embrace of Proposition 187 was followed by significant Hispanic movement toward the Democratic Party in California. Time series analysis substantiates that this action led to a long-term 7.1 percentage point Democratic shift among California's Hispanics. This suggests that state-level actors can influence partisan coalitions in their state, beyond what would be expected from national-level factors.

This study examines lobbying activity during four California policymaking processes and through the four institutional venues available in that state: the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and the ballot initiative. It shows that past advocacy activity explains future mobilization on the same policy issue. Groups that fail to reach their policy goals will be more likely to mobilize later if the policy process changes venue, compared with those that have achieved their policy preference. Thus, the availability of multiple venues provides a counterweight to the possible advantages received by certain group types in each venue. Furthermore, public interest groups are more likely to mobilize across venues and repeatedly within a venue, while business groups are less likely to do so.

Judicial elections have two opposing effects on legitimacy perceptions for state supreme courts. Elections not only provide a boost to legitimacy through the chance to hold officials accountable but also involve campaign activity that decreases legitimacy perceptions. This article examines these two opposing effects using a nationally representative survey that includes items assessing diffuse support for state supreme courts. It uses multiple indicators to differentiate between states with highly active election systems involving large amounts of campaign activity and states with less active elections systems that involve little campaign activity. The results from the survey show that the legitimacy of elected courts is higher than appointed courts but only in states with little election activity. In states with high amounts of election activity, the legitimacy of elected courts is lower than appointed courts.

While a large body of research exists regarding the role of industry money on roll-call voting in the U.S. Congress, there is surprisingly little scholarship pertaining to industry influence on state politics. This study fills this void in an analysis of campaign donations and voting during passage of Act 13 in Pennsylvania during 2011 and 2012. After collecting information about natural gas production in state legislative districts, we estimate a series of multivariate models aimed at uncovering whether campaign donations contributed to a more favorable policy outcome for industry. Our findings indicate that campaign donations played a small but systematic role in consideration of the controversial legislation, which represented one of the first and most important state-level regulatory reforms for the hydraulic fracturing industry.

The measure of legislative professionalization I developed was first published a quarter century ago. Since then, updates have appeared periodically. In this note, I briefly document the measure's usefulness in academic research and then calculate it for 2015. For reasons I detail, the updated measure is corrected for a misestimate of days in session for some states.

Most studies of amicus influence in both federal and state courts assume that the information provided in these briefs is the mechanism through which amici influence court outcomes. However, the question of how individual state supreme court judges respond to this third-party information and whether or not judicial responses are conditioned by differing methods of judicial retention is rarely theorized. Using social-psychological theories of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, this article investigates how ideological predispositions and electoral institutions structure the responsiveness of state high-court judges to amicus brief information. Utilizing an original dataset of more than 14,000 votes of state high-court judges across three distinct areas of law, this article tests competing theories of amicus influence to determine how state high-court judges utilize amicus information to render judicial decisions. Results are generally supportive of the informational theory of amicus influence in complex areas of law. However, a conditioning relationship of retention method suggests that competitive elections may alter the mechanism of amicus brief influence such that judicial responsiveness to third-party briefs is more closely tied to the reelection and campaign fundraising considerations of individual judges in politically contentious areas of law.

The distribution of income lies at the intersection of states and markets, both influencing and responding to government policy. Reflecting this reality, increasing research focuses on the political origins of inequality in the United States. However, the literature largely assumes—rather than tests—the political mechanisms thought to affect the income gap. This study provides a timely reassessment of one such mechanism. Leveraging variation in labor laws between states and differences in the timing of adoption of right-to-work (RTW) legislation, I examine one political mechanism blamed by many for contributing to inequality. Using a variety of panel designs, I find little evidence that RTW laws have been a major cause of growing income inequality, pointing to the importance of grounding theoretical arguments about the interrelationships between states and markets in a sound empirical reality.

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.

Most state supreme court justices have time-bound terms that require them to be reappointed or reelected after a certain amount of time. In three American states, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia, the legislature has the sole power to retain justices. Legislatures, and their specialized judiciary committees, are well positioned to monitor judicial behavior and can reject retention for justices who are unacceptable. This turns the legislature's oversight authority into influence over policy making by justices who still need to be reappointed to additional terms. But some justices (co-partisans) are insulated from this influence by their connections to the majority party, which substantially increases the likelihood of their retention. I show that, between 1995 and 2014, justices appointed by the minority party who were eligible for a new term voted more in line with the preferences of their legislature than those who were no longer eligible for a new term due to mandatory or voluntary retirement. No similar effect is found among appointees of the majority party. To support my argument that it is the legislature's reappointment authority that gives them this power, I conduct a placebo test to show that governors in these states enjoy no comparable influence on reappointment-seeking justices. This legislative influence represents a substantial limitation on judicial independence.

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.

By using American state-level data from 1999 to 2008, this article explores how the recent immigrant influx has influenced public welfare spending in the American states. By integrating the race/ethnicity and globalization compensation theory, I hypothesize that immigration will increase welfare spending in states with a bleak job market and exclusive state immigrant welfare policy; in contrast, immigration will decrease welfare spending in states with a good job market and inclusive state immigrant welfare policy. Empirical tests show evidence for both hypotheses, suggesting that the applicability of general political science theories depends on a combination of state policy and economic contexts.

This article contributes to our understanding of policy diffusion in two ways. First, by explicitly focusing on the competition mechanism of diffusion, I consider how policy externalities contribute to free-rider dynamics or competitive races across the American states. The second contribution is the focus on the interdependence of the early stages of agenda setting as well as policy enactments. Using a unique dataset on four different types of tobacco policies that are introduced and eventually enacted in the states from 1990 to 2010, I find evidence that states engage in free-riding dynamics and that strategic interaction exists in the early stages of agenda setting. There is also evidence that states respond to legitimate policy threats in neighboring states. Overall, the results stress the importance of scholars to explore the conditional nature of policy diffusion dynamics by focusing on variations in policy content and stages of the policymaking process other than policy enactment.

This article examines the differential effects of social capital on policy equity in state outcomes. Specifically, it explores the relationship between social capital and incarceration rates in the American states paying particular attention to racial disparities in incarceration rates. Building on work by Hero, I present a theoretical explanation and empirical support for how social capital operates differently under different racial contexts. I argue that social capital enhances social empathy in homogeneous contexts and social controls in diverse contexts. Using state-level longitudinal data on the contiguous states, I find that social capital is positively associated with incarcerations, but only for African Americans. Furthermore, the effects of social capital appear to be conditional on racial context where this relationship is stronger as minority group size increases.

Can politically polarizing events bear dividends for extremist lawmakers? Evidence from California legislative financial disclosures suggests they can. During the state's numerous budget shutdowns of the last 30 years, extremist legislators outside their party median could expect greater fund-raising hauls than their more centrist counterparts. The results suggest that polarizing events such as California's perennial budget impasses can make extremist positions more appealing to the polarized political elites who generally fund political campaigns. Regardless of the motivation, however, these results suggest a strong incentive to prolong political discord by extremists—a troubling outcome in cases where supermajority votes are required.

While most Americans appear to acknowledge the large gap between the rich and the poor in the United States, it is not clear whether the public is aware of recent changes in income inequality. Even though economic inequality has grown substantially in recent decades, studies have shown that the public's perception of growing income disparities has remained mostly unchanged since the 1980s. This research offers an alternative approach to evaluating how public perceptions of inequality are developed. Centrally, it conceptualizes the public's response to growing economic disparities by applying theories of macro-political behavior and place-based contextual effects to the formation of aggregate perceptions about income inequality. It is argued that most of the public relies on basic information about the economy to form attitudes about inequality and that geographic context—in this case, the American states—plays a role in how views of income disparities are produced. A new measure of state perceptions of growing economic inequality over a 25-year period is used to examine whether the public is responsive to objective changes in economic inequality. Time-series cross-sectional analyses suggest that the public's perceptions of growing inequality are largely influenced by objective state economic indicators and state political ideology. This research has implications for how knowledgeable the public is of disparities between the rich and the poor, whether state context influences attitudes about inequality, and what role the public will have in determining how expanding income differences are addressed through government policy.

In 15 American states, environmental protection agencies perform both pollution-control and natural resource conservation functions. In this study, I examine how this combination of functions affects the regulatory style embraced by these agencies. I find, through interviews with environmental agency workers and empirical analyses using enforcement data from 2010 to 2014, that the cooperation and flexibility with industry inherent to natural resource conservation efforts is a fundamental part of the regulatory process within these combined agencies. Great efforts are made to garner voluntary or negotiated compliance without the possible economic consequences of punitive actions. Enforcements are less frequent and less severe. The effect of this agency design choice is powerful, maintaining its effect even when controlling for political, ideological, and economical pressures. In a time where environmental protection agencies are increasingly interested in incorporating management-based regulation and voluntary compliance to supplement command and control regulation, it is more important than ever to understand the regulation that emerges from this combination.

Legislative committees rely on the expertise and experience of their members, but instability in committee systems threatens the enhancements in productivity associated with specialization. This can occur in two ways, both of which are more common in state legislative committees than they are in Congress. First, membership retention on committees is generally lower, even after accounting for differing levels of legislative turnover across legislatures. Second, many state legislative committee systems undergo reorganization between sessions, changing the policy jurisdictions, and, therefore, the applicability of members' previously developed expertise. In this article, I examine the consequences of these two sources of committee instability on legislative output in 14 state legislatures. I find that both membership retention and jurisdictional reorganization significantly affect the number of bills processed through committees and the number of bills ultimately enacted. These linkages are also conditioned on several committee and institutional factors, particularly legislative turnover. Last, I find a weaker but discernible effect of membership retention on committees' propensity to perform their gatekeeping role.