Over the past 30 years, the U.S. states have increased their participation as amici curiae significantly, in addition to winning more of their cases as direct parties. However, little attention has been paid to the factors that cause amici participation rates to vary among the states. The author examines the decision of state attorneys general (AGs) to initiate or join amicus curiae briefs in all 253 U.S. Supreme Court criminal procedure cases from 1990 through 2001. He hypothesizes that AGs are motivated largely by their own policy preferences and by their motivation to get reelected. Because amicus briefs are not particularly high-profile policy tools, reelection motivations ought to be demonstrated through responsiveness to elites in state government. The findings provide less support for this idea and more support for the idea that state AGs follow their own policy preferences through amicus participation.

Much of the academic literature that analyzes U.S. state-level restrictions on abortion focuses on parental involvement laws and the extent to which abortion is publicly funded through Medicaid. However, one shortcoming common to all of these studies is that they fail to analyze informed consent laws and other types of anti-abortion legislation that received constitutional protection through the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992). In this study, a series of regressions on a comprehensive time series cross-sectional data set provides evidence that several types of state-level anti-abortion legislation result in statistically significant declines in both the abortion rate and the abortion ratio. Furthermore, a series of natural experiments provide further evidence that abortion restrictions are correlated with reductions in the incidence of abortion.

The creation of racial/ethnic majority-minority districts lies at the heart of debates regarding the utility of descriptive representation for minority policy advocacy. The general puzzle that emerges from these debates, however, rests on the possibility that by electing representatives who are policy outsiders, minority interests would exert little influence in the policy decisions of median-dominated institutions. The authors present a model that shows how majority-minority districts can act to (1) increase the likelihood of electing minority representatives who are unique policy advocates and (2) concurrently increase the level of institutional status of descriptive representatives. The empirical analysis employs a novel data set of observations on political, sociodemographic, roll-call and institutional position, covering twenty U.S. states in the late 1990s and over 2,600 state legislative seats to show how majority-minority districts produce policy outsiders as well as institutional insiders.

We explore the effects of state-level election reforms on voter turnout in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections. Using a cost-benefit model of political participation, we develop a framework for analyzing the burdens imposed by the following: universal mail voting, permanent no-excuse absentee voting, nonpermanent no-excuse absentee voting, early in-person voting, Election Day registration, and voter identification requirements. We analyze turnout data from the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Current Population Surveys and show that implementation by states of both forms of no-excuse absentee voting and Election Day registration has a positive and significant affect on turnout in each election. We find positive but less consistent effects on turnout for universal mail voting and voter identification requirements. Our results also show that early in-person voting has a negative and statistically significant correlation with turnout in all three elections.

While there is a growing literature on the factors linked to the power held by leaders in state legislatures, the complexity of leadership power as a concept makes assessing it difficult. The author demonstrates that measures of formal leadership power derived from the written rules are uncorrelated with survey measures capturing legislators' own assessments of their leader's strength. These differences have practical importance, with each type of measure yielding different substantive findings in models predicting leadership power.