Debate rages over whether Americans have become enormously litigious, but little research considers why Americans file cases in the first place or adequately considers rates of litigation over time. This article examines tort filings in ten representative states over a 20-year period and analyzes the impact of social, political, policy, and legal system factors that may account for case filings. We find that filing rates vary substantially over time within individual states, which adds to cautions about claims of general litigiousness. Our analysis also demonstrates that social complexity, opportunities for political participation, and social policy are the most important explanations for variations in filing rates. The tendency of Americans to use the courts to resolve disputes is related to the milieu in which they live and how the political system responds to demands for participation and social support.

The implementation of federal programs provides an opportunity for state officials to impose their own interests on the policy process. The federal government delegates administrative power to the states to implement federal programs. Because elected state officials serve as one of the principals to street-level bureaucrats, these officials should be able to influence these street-level agents to implement policy to further state needs. However, very little research has examined whether street-level bureaucrats act strategically to benefit state interests as they implement policy. In this article, I use Seemingly Unrelated Regression analysis to examine variation in award rates across the 50 states in two federal disability programs, SSI and SSDI. My findings reveal that program incentives lead state street-level bureaucrats to act strategically in implementing these programs. State bureaucrats reduce access to federal programs when state governments incur costs associated with those programs, especially under conditions of fiscal stress.

In general, state public policy responds positively to increased electoral participation among social groups. However, consistent with the racial threat hypothesis, this pattern appears to reverse itself for African Americans: as blacks turn out in greater proportions they actually incur decreasing policy responsiveness. Another research tradition suggests that political parties play a crucial mediating role between interests and government. Thus, African Americans may be able to counter this backlash effect by increasing their participation in the Democratic partisan coalition. Using a variety of pooled time series techniques, we demonstrate the general robustness of the racial backlash model but find that when African Americans increase their contribution to the Democratic coalition, state policy responds better to their interests. This result demonstrates the centrality of parties for democratic responsiveness.

We compare spending in concurrent senate and gubernatorial elections to determine if campaign finance laws influence candidate campaign spending. We find that candidate-based public financing combined with spending limits influence candidate spending, but the effect is largely dependent on the level of the limits. We find that contribution limits do not influence candidate spending. If the goal of reform is to reduce candidate spending—or to affect electoral competition or voter turnout by reducing candidate spending—our results suggest that state public financing is more likely to be successful than contributions limits.

Previous research has found strong evidence of a pro-winner vote misreport bias in the National Election Studies (NES). We extend this research by examining the reported vote for U.S. senator and governor in the 1990, 1992, and 1994 NES and in the 1990 and 1992 Senate Election Studies (SES). We find continuing evidence of a pro-winner misreport problem. In contrast, we uncover no significant pro-winner bias in state exit polls conducted by the media. We test two commonly asserted explanations of the source of this misreport bias, but find no evidence that the problem is related either to the number of days between the election and the survey interview or to incumbency. Finally, we test a model of the misreport process that suggests that less politically engaged and less politically sophisticated voters are most likely to over-report support for the winner. Our results here are mixed; we find some evidence that Independents are more likely to misreport in favor of the winner, but we find no evidence that education level affects the likelihood of misreporting.

Graduate schools develop research skills primarily by teaching future social scientists quantitative and qualitative research methods. A solid understanding of these methods is necessary for conducting reliable research. Yet, these skills are unusable if we cannot access data in the first place. The goal of this article is to help researchers reduce some of the barriers to collecting data by describing several methods for obtaining data from state and local agencies.

The State Politics and Policy Data Archive is a free-access, web-based archive of publication-related datasets focusing on comparative American state politics and policy research. This essay describes the utility of the archive, provides instruction on its use, and requests that readers contribute data.