State policies shape firms’ incentives to lobby in the United States, but the existing lobbying literature mostly ignores these incentives. Using lobbying records for all electric utilities in the United States from 1998 to 2012, we examine how state policies affect federal lobbying by both proponents and opponents of federal support for the renewable energy policy. Our theory predicts that supportive state policies reduce the returns to lobbying by both proponents and opponents. Empirically, we show that when the federal production tax credit for renewable energy is about to expire, electric utilities from states without renewable portfolio standards become more likely to lobby than those from states with these policies. Because the timing of the expiration of the production tax credit is quasi-random, these findings carry a causal interpretation. Using text analysis techniques, we also show that the lobbying efforts are focused on energy and environmental issues while lobbying on unrelated topics remains unaffected.

This study examines how state government responses to economic crisis, in the form of unexpected changes in state fiscal policy, influence income inequality. State governments are vital actors in times of fiscal stress as nearly every state must make difficult policy decisions related to taxes and spending to address budget deficits, both of which are policies that shape the income gap. Focusing on periods of fiscal stress is important for the study of state inequality as those with fewer resources are the most likely to experience the consequences of their state’s fiscal response during these times. Using time-series cross-sectional data, this research demonstrates that income inequality increases when states respond to economic crisis by relying on unexpected spending cuts. These effects tend to persist even after initial economic downturns. In addition, one individual-level implication of the aggregate relationship between state policy responses and inequality—that people will be worse off financially when their states emphasize budget cuts in response to economic decline—is assessed using several post–Great Recession surveys. The findings have implications for the future of inequality in the United States and provide potential paths for state fiscal reform.

Do state politicians reward school districts that vote in favor of the party in power more than school districts that vote in favor of the opposing party? With large shares of money at the state level to transfer to local governments and the ability to target core voters, it would seem likely that politicians would take advantage of the ability to distribute education funds. However, in understanding how states distribute education funds, little emphasis is given to partisan influences, particularly the congruence between local school districts and the state level. To test this, I collected data at the precinct level within each state and, using mapping software, spatially joined precinct boundaries to school district boundaries. Once this relationship was established, I aggregated precinct-level information to school districts to understand the partisan voting patterns within each school district for elections from 2000 to 2010. This article finds evidence that funding formulas are susceptible to political influence and that parties are able to influence the geographic distribution of education funds to core voters.

In this article, we develop and make available measures of public ideology in 2010 for the 50 American states, 435 congressional districts, and state legislative districts. We do this using the geospatial statistical technique of Bayesian universal kriging, which uses the locations of survey respondents, as well as population covariate values, to predict ideology for simulated citizens in districts across the country. In doing this, we improve on past research that uses the kriging technique for forecasting public opinion by incorporating Alaska and Hawaii, making the important distinction between ZIP codes and ZIP Code Tabulation Areas, and introducing more precise data from the 2010 Census. We show that our estimates of ideology at the state, congressional district, and state legislative district levels appropriately predict the ideology of legislators elected from these districts, serving as an external validity check.