In this article, we use data from the American states from 1996 to 2008 to explore the effects of immigration on income inequality. Empirical evidence from both static and dynamic models shows that the foreign-born population has a strong positive effect on state-level income inequality, even when we control for a range of federal and state political and economic contextual variables. We also find that the positive relationship between immigration and state income inequality is driven primarily by low-skill immigrants (rather than high-skill immigrants), and we provide some evidence that high-skill immigrants lower income inequality for some segments of the income distribution. We conclude that immigration—particularly low-skilled immigration—has an important effect on income inequality in the American states.

This article examines the relationship between party competition for control of governing institutions and legislative party polarization. Although the competition/cohesion thesis dates to the 1940s, it has never before been subject to a test with data from the 50 states. Drawing upon newly available data, we take stock of the evidence. Five measures of party competition are used: (1) the number of recent shifts of party control, (2) an index of party competition for state offices, (3) the closeness of presidential elections in the state, (4) the effective number of political parties in the state, and (5) the ratio of Republicans to Democrats in the electorate. Nearly all of these measures correlate with higher levels of party polarization in both the lower and upper chambers, and none are associated with a lower level of polarization.

As members of democratic institutions, state legislators must frequently collaborate with each other to achieve their varied goals. Given the increased attention to questions of polarization and gridlock, scholars should be particularly interested in understanding legislator decisions to collaborate across party lines. This article is primarily concerned with how institutional arrangements—specifically term limits—structure legislators' decisions to cosponsor bills with partisan opponents. Using data on bill cosponsorship from 41 states (82 chambers), we demonstrate that term limits reduce bipartisan cosponsorship even when controlling for average legislative tenure. We argue that term limits accomplish this by altering the incentives that legislators face. In addition, we demonstrate that the effect of term limits depends on the level of legislative professionalization. When professionalization is high, the negative effect of term limits on bipartisan cosponsorship is particularly pronounced.

Prior research has found that descriptive representation by race, ethnicity, or gender increases political action, but it has paid less attention to how the intersection of these identities influences participation. We extend this literature by assessing the effects on voter turnout of collective descriptive representation in U.S. state legislatures on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, and their intersections. We argue that members of historically excluded groups respond to the overall composition of their state's legislature. We test this proposition in seven elections (2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012). Our results are consistent with the minority empowerment literature, as overall collective representation does substantially increase turnout among previously excluded groups. However, the impact varies intersectionally. For white women, gender trumps race, as higher collective gender representation, regardless of race or ethnicity, increases voter turnout. For African Americans, race trumps gender, as both black men and women respond most consistently to higher levels of collective racial representation. For Latinos, we find less consistent results, but note a collective ethnic turnout effect for 2002 and 2006. We conclude that collective representation, especially at the intersection of identities, is an important factor influencing levels of turnout among previously excluded groups.