Michael J. New, in a recent article in this journal, argues that a major reason for the decline in the incidence of abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1992 Casey decision was the increased number of antiabortion laws—parental involvement laws and informed consent laws—enacted at the state level. However, New's analysis contained critical data, measurement, methodological and estimation errors. This article details all the errors and then reexamines the effect of restrictive state abortion laws on the incidence of abortion over the period 1985–2005. The empirical results find little evidence that the decline in the number of abortions performed since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1992 Casey decision was due to the increase in the number of informed consent and parental involvement laws enacted.

Marshall Medoff and Christopher Dennis identify some errors in National Abortion Rights Action League's (NARAL) data on the effective start dates of various state-level antiabortion laws. However, they misunderstand the purpose of my 2011 State Politics and Policy Quarterly article which was to measure the impact of a range of antiabortion laws—not analyze competing theories as to why the abortion rate has fallen in the United States. Furthermore, their analysis contains a number of critical measurement, and methodological and estimation errors. When these errors are corrected, the empirical results add to the substantial body of peer-reviewed research which finds that public funding restrictions, parental involvement laws, and properly designed informed consent laws all reduce the incidence of abortion.

In New's response to our article he concedes that (1) his dataset had over 150 misclassification errors, (2) used an incorrect weight to correct for heteroscedasticity, (3) did not control for interstate travel by women to an out-of-state abortion provider, and (4) some of his empirical results are numerically implausible. Unfortunately, in New's reanalysis he makes many of the same errors as in his original article. Ironically, New's empirical evidence in Table 3 of his reassessment article corroborates our findings that informed consent laws (all statistically insignificant in his Table 3) had no measurable impact on the abortion rate of all women of childbearing age, adult women or teen minors over the period 1985- 2005. Moreover, New fails to acknowledge that he has a conflict of interest. He is an adjunct scholar with the self-proclaimed antiabortion Charlotte Lozier Institute. In addition, on September 15, 2012 at the annual meeting of Value Voters sponsored by the antiabortion Family Research Council, he told an audience of social conservatives that to stop abortions they should support legislation in states that would length the waiting period to have an abortion to nine months (audio available).

Legislative professionalism has played a prominent role in state politics research for decades. Despite the attention paid to its causes and consequences, recent research has largely set aside questions about professionalism's conceptualization and operationalization. Usually measuring it as an aggregate index, scholars theoretically and empirically treat professionalism as a unidimensional concept. In this article, we argue that exclusive use of aggregate indices can limit state politics research. Using a new dataset with almost 40 years of data on state legislative resources, salary, and session length, we reconsider the validity of using an index to study professionalism across the states. We evaluate the internal consistency of professionalism components over time, the relationship between components and the Squire Index, and the degree to which professionalism components are unidimensional using classical multidimensional scaling. We find enough commonality and enough variation between professionalism components to support a range of measurement strategies like the use of unidimensional indices (such as the Squire Index), disaggregating the components and analyzing their effects individually, or formulating multidimensional measures. Scholars should take care to choose the appropriate measure of the concept that best fits the causal relationships under examination.

We investigate the relationship between electoral institutions and committee autonomy in the context of U.S. state legislatures. The distributive theories of legislative organization suggest that electoral rules that make personal reputations more important motivate legislators to decentralize power and enhance committee autonomy to be able to target particularistic goods to their local constituencies. We argue that the distributive theories have direct implications for the relationship between candidate selection procedures and committee autonomy. The need to reach out to a large number of voters and to amass significant financial resources in states with more inclusive candidate selection procedures such as the open primary makes representatives more dependent on special interests, which is conducive to legislative particularism and committee autonomy. We take advantage of the great variation across the American states to investigate the effects of candidate selection procedures, a factor neglected in the previous literature. Examining 24 state legislatures from 1955 to 1995, we find that the inclusiveness of the selectorate, or the body electing candidates, has a significant effect on committee autonomy with more inclusive primary elections leading to more autonomous committee systems. By contrast, however, term limits were not a significant predictor of committee autonomy. This contributes to our understanding of how legislators amend institutional arrangements to achieve their electoral goals.

How do people assign blame in the wake of significant government failures? If the role of the citizenry in a representative democracy is to discipline elected officials for failing to meet collective expectations, then this question is of paramount importance. Much research suggests that the base tendency of citizens is to simply blame the other party—a normatively concerning outcome. However, some argue that information, especially that from expert and nonpartisan sources, may push citizens to overlook their party affiliation and assign blame in a more performance-based fashion. Using an experimental design, we test this possibility, manipulating whether there is unified or divided government, the partisanship of key actors, and the nature of expert information that participants receive during a hypothetical budget crisis at the state level. We find strong evidence that party weighs heavily on individuals' minds when assigning blame, as expected. More importantly, we find that nonpartisan expert information about the situation does not live up to its potential to sway partisans from their priors. Rather, unbiased information appears to be used as a weapon—ignored when it challenges partisan expectations and used to magnify blame of the other party when it conforms with them.

State legislative elections are increasingly shaped by two factors that influence the prospects of winning a majority: the redistricting cycle and partisan tide elections. Winning control of the redistricting process offers the prospect of shaping elections for the next decade, making majority status significantly more valuable than it otherwise might be. Partisan tides, on the contrary, can dramatically alter perceptions of which seats are safe or vulnerable and of whether majority status is obtainable or not. In this article, I examine how the proximity of redistricting and the presence of partisan tides are reflected in the strategies of the party organizations that contest state legislative elections. Using party finance data from 29 states during the period from 1996 to 2010, I find that parties' majority-seeking behavior is more intense in states with legislative redistricting, when redistricting is imminent, and when partisan tides favor the minority party.