This study creates and empirically tests an integrated model of trial court decision making to explore the hypothesis that jury verdicts reflect the social, political, and economic attributes of the community in which the court resides. In addition, the analyses examine the influence of attorneys, litigants, case facts, and judges on trial outcomes. Using an original data set comprising all reported civil trial verdicts decided in the state of Alabama from 2002 to 2008, we uncover strong evidence that community composition influences both the dispute resolution and resource allocation functions of trial courts. This research improves our knowledge of trial court decision making and contributes to our theoretical understanding of the effect of extralegal factors on the performance of political institutions.

Previous research has largely concluded that House elections have become less competitive in the modern era. Our research examines one area where we expect to observe more competition—namely, primary elections. In this article, we investigate when and where a state legislator will emerge to run in a congressional primary. All else equal, we expect that state legislators who can carry a large portion of their old state reelection constituency to the “geographic” congressional constituency will be more likely to emerge and receive a higher vote share in the election. Using geographic information systems (GIS) techniques, we are able to derive a measure of constituency congruency by focusing on the degree of intersection between state legislative and congressional districts. Our results indicate that state legislators are more likely to emerge in a primary if constituency congruency is high, especially in open seat contests. Congruency does not appear to provide an electoral advantage at the polls.

Google Insights for Search provides a new and rich data source for political scientists, which may be particularly useful for state politics scholars. We outline the prior uses of Google Insights for Search in social and health sciences, explain the data-generating process, and test for the first time the validity of this data for state politics research. Our empirical test of validity shows that Google searches for ballot measures' names and topics in state one week before the 2008 Presidential election correlate with actual participation on those ballot measures. This demonstrates that the more Internet searches there were for a ballot measure, the less likely voters were to rolloff (not answering the question), and establishes the construct validity for this data for one important topic in state politics research. We also outline the limitations to this data source.

Immigration remains a powerful and recurrent feature of American politics. Of the issues related to immigration, controversy over government policy for controlling illegal immigration occupies a central position in the debate. One increasingly important and prevalent type of control policy that has received little scholarly attention is worksite employment eligibility enforcement, otherwise known as E-Verify Laws. In the present article, we analyze variation in E-Verify policy adoption across the U.S. states, approaching the topic from multiple theoretical perspectives and testing several hypotheses pertaining to policy enactment. Our analysis points to the critical role of proportionate change in a state's immigrant population, as well as the political activity of immigrant-employing industries, in leading to policy adoption. Despite the use of multiple objective indicators, we fail to find strong evidence supporting the hypothesis that economic distress within a state increases its likelihood of enacting E-Verify legislation. Overall, our analysis contributes to an underdeveloped area of immigration policy research and sheds light on an important contemporary immigration issue, while drawing broader conclusions concerning the factors influencing the emergence of anti-immigration policies more generally.

Despite lofty expectations from the item veto's proponents (and fears from its opponents), formal models have suggested that the item veto is unlikely to have much effect beyond what a full veto could render. However, I show that different findings obtain when item vetoes are appreciated more fully as a dimensionality-reducing institution. I begin by developing a package veto model in a generalized multidimensional space. I then show how introducing the item veto changes the outcome by forcing veto bargaining into what is essentially a unidimensional space. As a result, executives with an item veto or other dimensionality-reducing institution (such as a single-subject rule) can be far more powerful in legislative bargaining than executives who lack these tools, other things being equal. I use simulations to demonstrate the model's main implications.

Empirical evidence suggests that voters in states with direct democracy feel better prepared to cast competent votes and that they do so at a greater rate than voters elsewhere. What causal mechanism explains why the presence of direct democracy leads to better civic citizenship and differences in political behavior? We use a survey experiment in which we randomly vary the text used to describe the policy proposals to consider one possible pathway that explains higher levels of political competence among voters in initiative states. In contrast to the focus on campaign mobilization in the existing literature, we rely on insights from consumer decision theory to derive testable hypotheses about voter behavior. We find evidence that voters in initiative states approach political campaigns in a fundamentally different way than voters in noninitiative states. In particular, we show that individuals in initiative states are less susceptible to framing effects—in our experiment, strategic efforts to craft a ballot measure's title and summary.