Several recent studies have investigated the relationship between direct democracy and public policy outcomes, with mixed findings. These inconsistencies may stem, in part, from researchers' failure to recognize that direct democracy institutions are distributed nonrandomly across the American states. That is, certain factors may lead a state to adopt the initiative process and influence other policy choices. We revisit the question of how the initiative influences state fiscal policy using panel data from 1960-2000 and a full-information maximum likelihood estimator that explicitly accounts for the endogeneity of the initiative. Our findings suggest that failure to endogenize the initiative in empirical analyses leads to substantially biased estimates of its effects. In particular, we find that once factors that predict whether a state has adopted the initiative are controlled, the initiative has a positive effect on state revenue generation and spending.

It is widely believed that direct democracy, in the form of the initiative, brought about cuts in state taxes and spending over the last quarter century. This belief is based on firsthand observation, case studies, and more than a dozen statistical studies (Matsusaka 2004). Marschall and Ruhil (2005) focus on one of the central issues in this literature: Did the initiative cause this perceived reduction in taxes and spending, or was there some unmeasured factor that led to adoption of the initiative as well as spending and tax cuts?

Do instruments of direct democracy affect policymaking and, if so, how? The political science literature is rife with increasingly sophisticated empirical efforts to answer these questions (Matsusaka 2004; Lupia and Matsusaka 2004). Having expended much energy over the past two decades studying the initiative's effects on state and local policy, Matsusaka (1995, 2004) is convinced that initiative states spend and tax less than states without the initiative (2004, 3; 1995). Agnostic about whether initiative states spend and tax more or less than noninitiative states but puzzled by scholars' failure to account for the endogeneity of the initiative in their models, we sought to determine whether the fiscal conservatism ascribed to the initiative remained after explicitly modeling states' initiative status. Our study, published in this issue of State Politics and Policy Quarterly contradicts Matsusaka's conclusions.

Can government institutions strengthen the influence of public opinion on policymaking? While institutions often limit representation, I identify two institutional features of state lawmaking that may enhance democratic control, but in somewhat different ways. I hypothesize that one institution external to the state legislature—the ballot initiative—improves representation on specific issues, while one institution internal to the legislature—the committee discharge procedure—enhances responsiveness to mass preferences generally. This difference emerges because legislators engage in repeated interactions and logrolling across a wide range of issues while advocates of ballot initiatives do not. My analyses largely, although not entirely, support these hypotheses, with the initiative making abortion policy more responsive and committee discharge making policy generally more responsive. These results suggest a domain-specific influence of institutions that were previously thought to have similar effects on policy representation.

Does the type of policy being considered determine the politics surrounding it? In this article, I examine how policy reversals may produce different politics than initial policy adoptions in the context of state river management policy. Traditionally, dam building was the dominant management policy, but in recent decades, efforts to restore rivers to their natural conditions through the removal of dams have become more prominent. I find that the patterns of state policymaking for policy reversals are generally similar to those that have been documented for policy adoptions, but with some important differences. Diffusion of reversals involves more states outside of active regions than is seen typically with policy adoption, and reversal diffusion occurs more gradually than adoption diffusion with many policy innovations. Finally, the most important determinants of these state policy reversals are a state's fiscal health and the presence of relevant interest groups.

Since 1990, the standard statistical approach for studying state policy adoption has been an event history analysis using binary link models, such as logit or probit. In this article, we evaluate this logit-probit approach and consider some alternative strategies for state policy adoption research. In particular, we discuss the Cox model, which avoids the need to parameterize the baseline hazard function and, therefore, is often preferable to the logit-probit approach. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the Cox model can be modified to deal effectively with repeatable and competing events, events that the logit-probit approach cannot be used to model.