Why are some institutions quickly replaced while others endure for more than a century? Majority cycling over institutions is theoretically unavoidable, but politics provides few opportunities to study it empirically. Using data on state constitutional characteristics and legislative composition from 1834 to 2012, this article advances the theory that institutions are more likely to be endogenously replaced when the society of actors differs from the time of enactment, and that institutional characteristics can exacerbate or mitigate these risks. Results show that political change interacts with institutional particularism to preserve or undermine state constitutions. More particularistic constitutions have shorter life spans because they are more vulnerable to changes in the political environment.

How candidates are selected, such as through nomination by party elites or election by primary voters, potentially influences the underrepresentation of women in political office. Partisan differences suggest that primary voters in right-leaning parties might select fewer female nominees than would their left-leaning counterparts even if both parties' elites are equally likely to select female nominees. This hypothesis is confirmed by an analysis of lieutenant governors in the United States, a position that varies in whether candidates are appointed by party elites or elected by primary voters. In cases where lieutenant-governor candidates are appointed, Democratic and Republican gubernatorial nominees are equally likely to choose female running mates; where primary voters select the lieutenant governor, Republicans are less likely to nominate women.

The Great Recession of late 2007 through 2009 had profound negative economic impacts on the U.S. states, with 49 states experiencing revenue decreases in their 2009 budgets representing more than $67.2 billion USD. Also during this period, states enacted a record number of laws related to immigrants residing in their states. We make use of data from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) to examine punitive immigration policy enactment from 2005 to 2012 and conduct a state comparative study using cross-sectional time-series analysis to examine the potential ways in which the economic recession and changing demographics in the states have impacted punitive state immigration policy making. We hypothesize that although anti-immigrant anxieties are driven in part by economic insecurity, they are also impacted by the presence of a large or growing proportion of racialized immigrants. We find that increases in state Hispanic populations and state economic stressors associated with the recession have both led to a greater number of enacted punitive state immigration policies. In addition, we find that changes in the non-Hispanic white populations in the states are also impacting the expression of anti-immigrant attitudes in state policy during this period.

We propose a model of public response to politicized election reform. In this model, rival partisan elites send signals on the need and consequences of a proposed reform, with partisans in public adopting those positions. We apply this to test how state use of voter identification laws corresponded with public evaluations of the conduct of a state's elections. We find that the relationship between photo identification laws and confidence in state elections was polarized and conditioned by party identification in 2014. Democrats in states with strict photo identification laws were less confident in their state's elections. Republicans in states with strict identification laws were more confident than others. Results suggest strict photo identification laws are failing to instill broad-based confidence in elections, and that the reform could correspond with diminished confidence among some.

Leading theories of local responses to immigration claim that ideology drives policy differences. However, these studies focus exclusively on policy adoption, neglecting whether or not ideological preferences also govern the extent to which local actors choose to cooperate with federal immigration initiatives. To account for this shortcoming, I use zero-inflated negative binomial regression to assess county-level deportations resulting from local participation in the Secure Communities program. I find that existing financial and structural resources as well as financial incentives are strong determinants of county deportation levels. Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that conservative counties produce more deportations. Instead, the size of a county's policing budget moderates the relationship between ideological orientations and deportation outcomes. With federal-local policy partnerships on the rise, these findings provide an important foundation for developing a better framework to understand the implications of such partnerships for policy implementation. In short, this article suggests that although policy adoption may be a politicized process, local compliance with federal initiatives is highly dependent on the resource constraints and incentives of the actors involved.