The power and ability of state governments to impose regulations vary according to the state and national politics, policy problems, the nature and power of business and groups, and state institutional structures. Citizens regularly complain about the regulatory reach of the state but often demand state regulation of the environment, consumer safety, industry, insurance, health care, and professions. State elected officials likewise complain about the regulatory reach of the state and, in some cases, work diligently to remove regulations that are thought to hamper industries or that citizens find especially egregious. Sometimes there is disagreement over what constitutes desirable and undesirable regulations. For example, in 2010, the Florida legislature passed a seemingly simple law requiring septic systems to be inspected every 5 years. It was proposed by Republican members of the House and Senate and supported by the state peak homebuilders association, which is a strong interest in a state long dominated by the real estate industry. The then-presiding governor ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate and the incoming Republican governor won the election narrowly with strong rural conservative support. Some of the legislators who had initially signed the previously uncontroversial regulation heard complaints from their constituents regarding the possible cost of mandated repairs and the estimated $150–$200 price of inspections every 5 years. He refused to sign the law, arguing that septic tank regulation is a function best left to county governments. There is no mandatory septic system inspection in Florida, which environmental groups note is dangerous given the state's being situated on top of the Floridan aquifer that provides water for drinking, agriculture, and recreation for the state's citizens and is threatened by leaking septic systems.

In this article, we present and test a market-based model of news content about state courts of last resort. We test our theory by examining newspaper coverage of decisions in death penalty cases. Our empirical results indicate that news elements of drama, novelty, and sensationalism influence coverage of state high courts' death penalty cases rather than traditional indicators of legal salience. News content either anywhere in a newspaper or on its front page is influenced by similar factors, but front-page coverage is more sensitive to dramatic conviction reversals and the rarity of executions in a given state. Our results suggest that traditional explanations of the relationship between crime and newsworthiness have limited impact on media attention given to state supreme courts. Media coverage of state high courts is instead associated primarily with the behavior of the court and its justices.

Recently, many U.S. states that allow citizen initiatives have passed laws designed to make it more difficult for an initiative to qualify for the ballot (e.g., by increasing the number of signatures required to get on the ballot), thereby making it harder for citizens to bypass the legislature and make direct changes to public policy. Such laws have reduced both the number of measures that make the ballot and the number that pass on Election Day. I show that laws governing access of initiatives to the ballot also shape the policy agenda; provisions making it harder for proposals to get on the ballot decrease the complexity of the initiatives on the ballot. As less complex initiatives are more likely to be understood by voters and voters are reluctant to vote for measures they do not understand, more restrictive laws actually increase the likelihood that an initiative will pass.

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We investigate whether Maine and Arizona's Clean Elections laws, which provide public funding for state legislative candidates, are responsible for producing a new cadre of legislators who are unusually ideologically extreme. We find that there is essentially no important difference in the legislative voting behavior of “clean” funded legislators and traditionally funded ones in either Arizona or Maine: those who are financed by private donors are no more or less ideologically extreme than those who are supported by the state. This finding calls into question some concerns about the effects on polarization of money generally and public funding in particular.

Most lobbying is invisible, meaning that interest groups routinely contact government officials “off the public record.” While such lobbying is ubiquitous, whether and how it may affect public policy decision-making remains largely unknown. I theorize that lobbying that employs both invisible and visible tactics is the most influential. I study the development of 38 health-related regulatory policies in Wisconsin to assess this argument. I employ government records, survey data from more than 350 individuals, and interviews with 15 state policymakers. I find that invisible and visible lobbying—when performed in combination—are associated with greater regulatory policy change. From a normative perspective, these results are both reassuring and troubling. On one hand, the results suggest that invisible lobbying, on its own, rarely drives state regulatory policy shifts. Yet, on the other hand, those interested parties with the resources necessary to lobby across multiple modes are more likely to see policy change.

In 2000, Virginia became the last state in the nation to add party labels to its ballots for state-level races. This article assesses the impact of this reform on citizen participation and the partisan behavior of down-ballot voters using precinct-level election returns. It finds that after the application of labels, roll-off in contested, down-ballot races dropped by about a percentage point, a reduction of approximately 15%. Roll-off dropped more in precincts with a larger share of African Americans. Also, the association between Republican vote shares in the Lt. Governor and state legislative races and presidential vote share in the 2000 general election became stronger in the presence of party labels. This result suggests that the labels made voters behave more as national partisans in state-level contests.

Enns and Koch (hereafter E&K) use multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) along with survey aggregation to measure state policy mood. As E&K rely on direct information about public opinion, it would be preferable to Berry et al.‘s widely used indirect measure relying on data about the issue positions and vote shares of members of Congress, if E&K's measure were valid. Assessing the validity of E&K's measure takes on special importance because the measure proves to be nearly uncorrelated with Berry et al.‘s measure, implying that at least one is invalid. Because the “true” policy mood of states is unknown, it is impossible to definitively assess the validity of E&K's measure. Instead, we raise some concerns about E&K's measurement methodology and present evidence pertaining to the indicator's face validity, convergent validity, and construct validity. Our analyses leave us doubtful that the E&K measure is valid because its characterization of state moods departs significantly from conventional wisdom and current scholarship.

Although research demonstrates that favorable ballot position can deliver candidates a small windfall of votes in local, nonpartisan, and primary elections, it is not clear whether ballot order laws have had any impact on the composition of U.S. legislatures. In this article, I estimate the substantive significance of ballot order rules by comparing the legislators of states that alphabetically order ballots to those elected by states that randomize or rotate ballot order. I also compare legislators elected by states that started or stopped alphabetically ordering ballots in recent decades. I find that states that alphabetically order ballots disproportionately elect candidates with early alphabet surnames. My research challenges the prevailing belief that ballot order affects only minor elections and suggests that seemingly innocuous rules have altered our political landscape. I conclude that arbitrary ballot ordering rules should be reformed to remedy their substantial impact on political representation.

Recently, we introduced and validated annual state-level estimates of the public's policy mood and party identification from 1956 to 2010 and self-identified political ideology from 1976 to 2010. In this issue, Berry, Ringquist, Fording, and Hanson (BRFH) compare our measure of policy mood with a measure they created, and they conclude that their measure is “the best available indicator of state policy mood for researchers doing pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis.” In this article, we show that BRFH's skepticism of our measure and confidence in their measure result from a failure to fully consider over-time dynamics. When we consider over-time variation, the Enns and Koch measure of policy mood continues to perform well. By contrast, some concerning patterns emerge with the BRFH measure. In addition to further validating the Enns and Koch measure, this article speaks to similarities in opinion change across states and offers initial evidence of an over-time relationship between state policy mood and state spending priorities.

In many states, agency rules are subject to review and possible veto by elected political officials in the legislative and/or executive branches. The consequences of this rule review authority are little understood. Using time-series cross-section data on state environmental compliance costs, this study investigates the impact that several types of administrative rule review procedures have on the stringency of state environmental regulation. The findings suggest that (1) both gubernatorial and legislative rule review powers are systematically associated with reduced environmental compliance costs, (2) legislatures controlled by the Democratic Party use rule review powers to reduce these costs less than Republican ones, and (3) the latter effect is observable only when legislatures have the power to amend or veto rules without the approval of the governor. These results indicate that rule review plays an important, but complex, role in shaping regulatory outcomes.

The number and variety of state policies regulating abortion each year is increasing. Opponents of abortion adopted a strategy of “legal but inaccessible” that has resulted in the passage of more than 700 state laws since the early 1990s. Despite being a very active area of policy making, we lack a coherent explanation for the proliferation of abortion policy. Scholars studying different policies at discrete moments in time have come to conflicting conclusions about how well theories of morality policy and representation explain abortion policy. Using an original dataset comprised of a near-universe of pro- and anti-abortion rights policy from 1973 to 2013, I establish the ways in which partisan control of the government and the moral preferences of constituents shape state policy. I find that anti-abortion rights policies are well explained by both theories but that pro-abortion rights policies are not well explained as a morality policy or with descriptive representation. In addition, I show the heterogeneous effect of representation across anti-abortion rights policies; Democratic women and governors decrease the probability of only certain anti-abortion rights policies.

Once legislators delegate policymaking responsibility to executive agencies, they have the ability to oversee and potentially influence the actions of these agencies. In this article, we examine, first, whether the actions of agencies reflect the preferences of legislators, and second, whether legislative professionalism enhances the ability of legislatures to influence executive agencies and obtain more preferred outcomes. We study these effects in the context of annual nursing home inspections performed by state administrators and make two predictions. First, as Democratic legislators will, on average, prefer a more activist role for government and for government agencies, we should see agencies issue more citations for violations of regulations when state legislatures are Democratic and fewer when they are Republican. Second, as more professionalized legislatures are better able to monitor the agency inspectors' actions and inspection outcomes, this effect should be intensified for legislatures with greater professionalism. We find support for both arguments: agencies faced with more Democrats in the legislature will be more activist, and this effect is strengthened for more professional legislatures.

This article examines how the institutional characteristics of state legislatures and governors affect state policy priorities. We argue that differences in the nature of their respective constituencies lead legislators to press for particularized benefits while governors favor collective goods. Empirical analysis of state-level data from 1982 through 2011 confirms that this is the case. The organizational arrangements of the two branches of government have an impact that is usually greater than that of state public opinion but generally less than that of state interest groups. The results from this analysis are important because they show that institutional structure has systematic effects that are independent of ideology, partisanship, and the other factors that are known to shape state policy making.

Recent elections have witnessed substantial debate regarding the degree to which state governments facilitate access to the polls. Despite this newfound interest, however, many of the major reforms aimed at increasing voting convenience (i.e., early voting and no-excuse absentee voting) were implemented over the past four decades. Although numerous studies examine their consequences (on turnout, the composition of the electorate, and/or electoral outcomes), we know significantly less about the factors leading to the initial adoption of these policies. We attempt to provide insights into such motivations using event history analysis to identify the impact of political and demographic considerations, as well as diffusion mechanisms, on which states opted for easier ballot access. We find that adoption responded to some factors signaling the necessity of greater voting convenience in the state, and that partisanship influenced the enactment of early voting but not no-excuse absentee voting procedures.

Despite a long history of nonpartisanship, the Nebraska state legislature has polarized rapidly within the past decade. Using interviews and campaign finance records, we examine politics in the modern Unicam to investigate nonpartisan polarization. We find that newly instituted term limits created opportunities for the state's political parties to recruit and finance candidates in an increasingly partisan fashion. Social network analysis suggests that there is a growing level of structure to campaign donations, with political elites increasingly less likely to contribute across party lines. The results offer a compelling example of parties overcoming institutions designed to eliminate them.

Inequality in political participation is a well-known and often studied feature of American politics. An important study examining misreporting of voter turnout in opinion surveys, however, calls into question the true extent of participation inequality. Ansolabehere and Hersh's first-ever 50-state vote validation project shows that those with more political resources are more likely to misreport turnout. That is, those with higher incomes are more likely than others to report that they had voted when in fact they did not. These findings suggest that income disparities in participation are not as large as opinion surveys have led us to believe. Moreover, studies using differences between voters and nonvoters as a key political indicator may also be biased. This article presents the first assessment of whether vote misreporting creates systematic bias in measures of state participation inequality. An index of economic inequality in participation for the 50 states is developed using the Ansolabehere and Hersh validated vote data and compares the measure of political inequality with a similar measure using traditional (i.e., nonvalidated) survey data. These state indices are used to determine the extent of bias produced by misreporting and whether this bias has implications for studies using these measures of participation inequality. The latter is assessed by examining the influence of the self-reported and validated inequality measures on state welfare programs and minimum wage policy.

High-profile advocates are pushing states to move away from judicial elections and toward a “merit” method because it purportedly produces the best quality judges. Quality, however, is difficult to measure empirically. Rather than attempt to measure quality, we examine whether certain types of state supreme courts are more forward-looking than others. States are likely to desire forward-looking behavior among judges because it can protect judicial legitimacy, help states to control policy, and could be more efficient than myopic behavior. Using a recent innovation in matching called covariate-balancing propensity scores, we find that the U.S. Supreme Court is equally likely to review and reverse decisions by judges regardless of their selection or retention methods. These results suggest that state supreme court justices, no matter their paths of getting to (and staying on) their courts, are roughly equal in terms of forward-looking behavior.

When the U.S. Supreme Court exercises its power of judicial review over state laws, its decisions, like the legislation it considers, frequently speak to major policy debates. Despite the Court's routine involvement with state statutes, theoretical explanations of judicial review generally do not distinguish between state laws and federal laws. The characteristics of state legislatures lead legislators in different states to have distinct perspectives and incentives, and ultimately affect the types of laws enacted in different states. We suggest that because the level of professionalism of state legislatures affects the types of laws pursued by different states, it may also affect the likelihood that a state has a law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. We find support for this expectation. Specifically, legislative professionalism is associated with an increased likelihood that a state has a law invalidated by the Court. This new evidence indicates that it is important to consider the legislative context in which state laws originate when examining the Court's review of state laws.

Scholars have suggested that interest groups affect the diffusion of innovations across states by creating a network of information between the states that aids in the spread of policy ideas. Still, the unique role that interest groups play in policy diffusion networks is not fully understood, in large part because the current methodology for studying diffusion cannot parse out interest group influence. We address this problem by analyzing the actual text of legislation, moving away from binary adoption to a more nuanced measure of policy similarity. This allows us to distinguish whether states emulate other states or interest group model legislation. We use text similarity scores in a social network analysis to explore whether early-adopting states or interest groups are more central to the network. We apply this analytical framework to two policies—abortion insurance coverage restrictions and self-defense statutes. Based on this analysis, we find that a fundamentally different picture of policy diffusion networks begins to emerge—one where interest group model legislation plays a central role in the diffusion of innovations.