Social services in the United States are supplied by both the public and private sectors. Previous political science research has focused on public transfers or Medicaid; I study “Other Public Welfare” programs that include contracts and grants to private social services providers, focusing on the relationship between the two sectors. My results imply that an increase in either Other Public Welfare spending or private individual and family services employees leads to an increase in the other sector. I find weaker evidence of similar relationships involving private residential care or day care services, and private social services employment is generally independent of public spending on transfers and Medicaid. My results have implications for the full effects of changes in public welfare spending, including the effects on the private sector, as well as the effects of organized interests on public welfare spending.

This article examines differences in the drivers of state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Medicaid immigrant eligibility policies, determined in the wake of the 1996 Welfare Reform. The findings show that differences in the incentive structures of the two programs may affect the way race politics influence each. Specifically, race is a strong negative correlate for TANF inclusion of immigrants as states with large African American populations were more likely to exclude legal permanent residents from the program. In the case of Medicaid, the size of the immigrant population is a strong positive correlate for inclusion. The effect of the size of the black population, although negative, is small and not significant. The study confirms extant research findings that ideological factors play an important role in the formation of both policies.

This article examines the role of wealth in the redistricting process in state legislative contests. I argue that the decision by state redistricting mapmakers to pursue a “seatswing” or “protection” strategy involves more than just a choice between where to move partisan voters. Redistricting may also allow parties to consider wealth as an additional resource to be concentrated or dispersed across legislative districts. To test this wealth-based hypothesis, I examine state redistricting plans in California and North Carolina. Logistic regression analyses of census block group exchanges between state legislative districts reveal that income plays a significant role in redistricting decisions.

We present a new unified dataset of common-space ideal points, committee assignments, and financial interests for all state legislators in 1999. We describe the compilation of the dataset and offer a few possible applications.

Policy representation requires legislators to advance the interests of their constituents. As a consequence, much research on representation examines the congruence between constituents' preferences and legislators' behaviors. This article argues it is more realistic to think of policy representation as listening—a process—than congruence—an outcome. Listening involves legislators monitoring constituent interests and using that information in making decisions. Using data from a survey of state legislators in 26 states, this research finds that monitoring contributes to using constituent information and offers a measure of listening based on these two behaviors. Furthermore, it finds that compared with the decisions of others, the decisions (measured as cosponsoring gay, lesbian, and bisexual [GLB] issue legislation) of legislators who listen are more strongly influenced by district preferences (measured as district votes on same-sex marriage ballot initiatives). This suggests that listening contributes to representation.

The American State Administrators Project is a half-century long research program surveying the attitudes and behavior of state agency leaders. The project has produced a voluminous number of publications and conference papers. At the same time it has also faced several difficulties in making its data more widely available to the scholarly community. This paper describes the Project, some of the data difficulties it has faced, and the portion of the data being distributed with this article.

The idea of social capital has had a powerful impact on the study of politics, policy, and social science at large. Much of what we know about the causes and effects of social capital, however, is limited by the nature of data used regularly by scholars working in this area. Current data sets allow researchers to study changes in social capital over time at the national level and static differences in the distribution of social capital across the states. The inability of scholars to know how social capital varies over time and across space limits the kinds of questions that can be asked. In this article, we use sample data of more than 20,000 individuals conducted biannually in the continuous 48 states by the marketing research firm MediaMark Research, Inc. to create a unique measure of social capital that varies across time and space. These data are available at the state level from 1986 through 2004.