Many suburban and urban residents spend little time contemplating where their food and energy come from. This chapter begins with the author’s introduction to West Virginia – coal country – in all its complexity. That complexity includes regional domination by fossil fuel interests, environmental and economic degradation, and political conflict, intermingled with the region’s uniquely appealing cultural traditions, natural amenities, and local efforts to fight for a better future, including through labor uprisings, law clinics, and savvy politics. West Virginia serves as an entry point for the book’s broader analysis of the half-truths often told about rural communities generally to justify extraction of rural natural resources for urban consumption. The analytical lens of law and political economy is introduced as the book’s tool to debunk myths about rural communities. Centrally, rural America is not, as we are often told, a product of benign markets operating organically. Rural America is a creature of public creation. The book illustrates how US laws, institutions, and policymakers have created, perpetuated, and justified rural disadvantage. By highlighting the human role in geographic inequality, this search for accountability can help inform a more prosperous, equitable, and resilient future for all, especially in the face of climate change.

In this chapter, we bring together motives (issues), means (gubernatorial powers), and opportunities (interest group compositions) using qualitative case studies of four states across several years: two with strong governors (New York and West Virginia) and two with weak governors (North Carolina and Vermont). The size of the budgets in these states varies, but they entail three subcategories that correspond with capture [corrections], instability [hospitals], and deadlock [welfare]. An investigation of twelve policy stories provide evidence for the mechanisms connecting governors and interest groups in periods of budgetary change. The policy stories cover similar temporal periods (2002–2004 and 2008–2010) controlling for national political context. We show that – large or small states – governors attempt to use their powers in all policy domains, but are met with much greater resistance in capture and deadlock categories.

We explore the policy feedback process and describe how state policies have evolved or devolved in the specific issue area of firearm laws and domestic violence. This chapter demonstrates how and when states respond to the need to reform their domestic violence laws and shows how key actors in that process, including legislators and interest groups, affect the content of the policy that is adopted. The chapter includes examples of states whose definition and scope of domestic violence laws vary and contrast them with each other and with federal law. We present six studies of states that differ in their legislative histories on domestic violence laws to identify key factors that can explain this variation; we test these factors in the quantitative analysis presented in Chapter 4.

This chapter provides detailed case studies of recent ballot reform efforts in Michigan and North Carolina.These states have detailed data on the level of straight ticket voting by county. These data are used to demonstrate how county characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and poverty interact with straight ticket voting and ballot rolloff.We find a strong connection between straight-ticket voting, minority populations, and ballot rolloff.This chapter concludes with analysis of recent changes in Iowa and West Virginia.The findings for Iowa suggest that the effects of ballot design changes are muted in areas that have lower proportions of non-white residents and that are less densely populated.

West Virginia is the most recent state to have changed from partisan to nonpartisan elections for its judges, with the first nonpartisan elections occurring in 2016. Impetus for change came in significant part after controversial elections for the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, one in 1988 and another in 2004. However, those controversies were not enough to produce the change; it took the capture of the West Virginia legislature by the Republican Party, which had long advocated for nonpartisan elections, to produce the 2015 legislation that made the change. Democratic legislators were divided about the change, with some voting in favor and some opposed; the Democratic governor signed the legislation. Unrelated to the change in election format, in 2018 the justices of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals became embroiled in allegations of misuse of government property and extravagant expenditures on their offices. These allegations led to three justices resigning, one of whom pled guilty to criminal charges, and a second being convicted at trial and sentenced to prison.