How does minority racial and ethnic descriptive representation exert policy influence in majoritarian representative institutions? And how do nonrepresentative majoritarian institutions, such as the citizen initiative, affect the degree of this influence? I use an event history analysis of state adoption of English Only laws from 1984 to 2002 to test a model of minority policy influence that is exerted through the possession of state legislative leadership positions. Unlike previous studies, I find that the size of the minority population and the level of descriptive representation in the legislature exert only an indirect effect on legislative policy decisions. Furthermore, the majoritarian rules of the initiative undermine the policy influence minorities gain through legislative leadership and can actually lead to a policy backlash.

Modern American state governorships have great formal policymaking authority, but, like the presidency, they also possess various informal powers to influence policymakers and policymaking. Among the most important of these informal powers is a governor's popularity with the public. Efforts to explain variation in gubernatorial popularity have yielded mixed results, in part because of limited data on governors' approval ratings and underspecified models. We assess the determinants of gubernatorial popularity that fall along both a national-state dimension and an economic-political dimension using the new U.S. Officials Job Approval Ratings dataset. Our results suggest that the proper focus of gubernatorial popularity research should be to distinguish not between its national and state influences but between its economic and political influences, as both national and state unemployment rates are central to explaining public assessments of governors in our models.

Does direct democracy make it impossible to balance public sector budgets? I address this question with evidence from California, where it is widely believed that voter initiatives have paralyzed the state budget process by locking in high spending while simultaneously prohibiting tax increases. A review of all initiatives approved since 1912 shows that no more than 32 percent of appropriations in the 2003-04 California state budget were locked in by initiatives and that initiatives placed only minimal constraints on the legislature's ability to raise revenue. Moreover, it is likely that the legislature would have allocated much of the money to its dedicated purpose even if it had not been required to do so by initiative. Initiatives do not appear to be a significant obstacle to balancing the state budget in California.

Electing members of legislatures through multimember districts (MMDs) reduces racial and ethnic minorities' descriptive representation in those bodies, but is their substantive representation also hurt? Do legislative MMDs lead to worse policy outcomes for minorities independent of their effect on legislative demographics? To address these questions, I examine welfare policy in the states from 1997 to 2000. I find evidence that suggests that states whose upper legislative chamber is comprised of MMDs have significantly less generous welfare policy. I conclude that MMDs do indeed damage the substantive representation of racial and ethnic minorities in legislatures, independent of their effect on descriptive representation.

Following the problems with presidential voting in Florida in 2000, voters and political scientists became interested in election administration. While empirical studies have shown that different election equipment can produce different tabulation error rates, little is known about the factors that affect voters' perceptions of good election administration. Using a survey of voters in Georgia, we examine these perceptions of the voting process. We find that black voters and Democrats were significantly less confident than others that their votes were counted accurately and that they were also more likely to express concerns over the election equipment they used. In contrast, the actual voting environment, including the type of voting equipment used, appears to have no direct bearing on voters' trust in the process.

Scholars are beginning to consider how state campaign finance regulation influences political behavior and elections, but they lack the systematic measure of these regulations needed to do so. This article describes a simple measure of state campaign finance regulation stringency that is based on state statutes in 2002. Further, this article explains the construction of the measure and assesses its validity and reliability. The index generally confirms qualitative assessments of state campaign finance regulation, and it is correlated with measures of related aspects of state campaign finance regulation, campaign spending, and fundraising.