What explains the extension of greater rights to traditionally marginalized minorities? This article compares the extension of legal equality to lebian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in Mexico and the United States with a focus on the legal recognition of same-sex relationships. A national-level comparison of gay rights in Mexico and the United States presents a theoretical puzzle: most theories predict that the United States would have more egalitarian policies than Mexico, but in fact, Mexico has provided greater legal equality for LGBT people for a longer time than the United States. A subnational analysis of equal relationship rights in the United States and Mexico provides evidence to support social movement and partisan theories of minority rights. We find that religion plays a different role in Mexico than in the United States. The different findings at the national and subnational levels suggest the importance of subnational comparative analysis in heterogeneous federal systems.

I examine how courts condition the relationship between state-level public opinion and policy. The system of federalism in the United States allows federal and state courts to establish the types of policies that states are constitutionally allowed to implement. In particular, federal courts can set “federal floors” for policy, below which no states can go. State courts, in turn, can raise the level of this floor. Thus, both federal and state courts shape whether state policy can match the preferences of the median voter in a given state. Analyzing data on public opinion, judicial decisions, and state-level policy on the issue of abortion, from 1973 to 2012, I show that changes in the set of allowable abortion restrictions, according to the combined decisions of state and federal courts, significantly affect whether states implement majority-preferred policies. I also show that ignoring the influence of courts on the policymaking environment significantly affects the estimated level of policy congruence and thus conclusions about the scope of representation. These results demonstrate the importance of placing courts in the larger study of state-level representation.

Charter schools enjoy support among Republican and Democratic lawmakers in states and Congress, but little research has examined their support among the electorate. We take advantage of Washington's 2012 charter school ballot initiative—the first voter-approved charter initiative in the United States—to shed light on the politics of school choice at the mass level. Because in-depth, individual-level voter data are often unavailable in state-level elections, we leverage extensive precinct- and district-level data to examine patterns of support and opposition toward the charter school initiative, focusing on how partisanship, ideology, and demographic factors serve to unify or divide voters. Our analysis reveals that the coalition of supporters cut across usual partisan and demographic cleavages, producing somewhat strange bedfellows. This finding has important implications for the strategies advocacy groups may consider as they seek to expand or limit school choice programs via ballot initiatives as opposed to the statehouse, and provides suggestive evidence regarding the evolving shapers of voter support for school choice and ballot initiatives more generally.

Voters often have difficulty making choices on the myriad state constitutional amendments they vote on each year. Without partisan cues, they turn to other sources for these low-salience, high complexity measures. One such source is newspaper endorsements. In this article, we look at newspaper endorsements of ballot measures in Florida over 20 years both on “no” votes and roll-off. We argue that endorsements' effect on “no” votes and roll-off differs in ways not previously appreciated. Newspaper endorsements have a positive impact on no votes, as expected from the information theory of voter participation. Endorsements have little impact on roll-off, which we posit is because roll-off voters are not likely to seek information from newspapers. Thus, newspaper endorsements serve to persuade, but not entice, voters to vote for ballot measures.