Legislators must decide when, if ever, to cosponsor legislation. Scholars have shown legislators strategically time their positions on salient issues of national importance, but we know little about the timing of position-taking for routine bills or what this activity looks like in state legislatures. We argue that legislators’ cosponsorship decision-making depends on the type of legislation and the partisan dynamics among the current cosponsors. Members treat everyday legislation as generalized position-taking motivated by reelection, yet for key legislation, legislators are policy-oriented. With a new dataset of over 73,000 bills introduced in both chambers of the Texas state legislature in the 75th to 86th regular sessions (1997–2020), we use pooled Cox proportional hazard models to evaluate the dynamics of when legislators legislate, comparing all bills introduced with a subset of key bills. The results show that legislators time their cosponsorship activity in response to electoral vulnerability, partisanship, and the dynamics of the chamber in which they serve.

We examine how institutional selection procedures affect the ideology of state supreme court chief justices. We argue that institutional selection methods empower those charged with choosing chief justices to select court leaders who reflect their own preferences, and we test this theory using data from all 50 American states from 1970 to 2017. Our results show that states that use popular elections to select chief justices tend to produce court leaders whose preferences reflect the electorate, and states that use commission-assisted elite appointment tend to produce chief justices whose preferences mirror those of political elites. While we find that peer election systems produce leaders with preferences similar to median court preferences, court preferences are also associated with other methods of chief justice selection.

Do reserved seats yield substantive representation for traditionally marginalized groups? To answer that question, we turn to a remarkable and little-studied institution: reserved seats for Native American tribes in the Maine House of Representatives. Tribal representatives, who can participate in debate but lack a vote, have represented tribes in Maine’s House of Representatives since statehood in 1820. We take advantage of a 1995 rule change that allowed tribal representatives to initiate legislation, and an original dataset of pro-tribal bills, to estimate the effect of reserved seats on the production of pro-tribal bills. We find that once tribal representatives were allowed to write bills, they produced over half of all tribal-related legislation during a 36-year period. Legislators with tribal constituents sponsored fewer relevant bills after the reform but continued to cosponsor pro-tribal legislation. Although our results show tribal representatives contribute to the legislative process, we caution that reserved seats are not a panacea for improving Indigenous representation.

This article introduces the State Executive Approval Database, a dataset of gubernatorial approval ratings that updates and adds to data previously collected by Beyle et al. In addition to the survey marginals, the dataset presents continuous quarterly and annual measures of the latent level of governor approval that are amenable for time series analysis. After evaluating how survey data availability varies across states and over time, I use the data to evaluate whether governors receive a honeymoon. While new governors do not have higher than expected levels of approval, the public expresses comparatively low levels of disapproval for new governors. This honeymoon is largely restricted to their first quarter in office and only occurs when they are elected to their first term. Governors who take office after their predecessor resigned get a slightly longer and more sustained reprieve from disapproval. Governor approval is also significantly shaped by unemployment levels in their state. These data will provide scholars with new opportunities to study accountability and representation at the state level.

Evidence suggests that well-funded, professional legislatures more effectively provide constituents with their preferred policies and may improve social welfare. Yet, legislative resources across state legislatures have stagnated or dwindled at least in part due to public antagonism toward increasing representatives’ salaries. We argue that one reason voters oppose legislative resources, like salary and staff, is that they are unaware of the potential benefits. Employing a pre-registered survey experiment with a pre–post design, we find that subjects respond positively to potential social welfare benefits of professionalization, increasing support for greater resources. We also find that individuals identifying with the legislative majority party respond positively to potential responsiveness benefits and that out-partisans do not respond negatively to potential responsiveness costs. In a separate survey of political elites, we find similar patterns. These results suggest that a key barrier to increasing legislative professionalism – anticipated public backlash – may not be insurmountable. The findings also highlight a challenge of institutional choice: beliefs that representatives are unresponsive or ineffective lead to governing institutions that may ensure these outcomes.