Multi-state lawsuits, filed by U.S. state attorneys general (AGs), have become an important method by which state consumer protection laws are enforced. Patterns of participation in these lawsuits vary tremendously across the states, yet little is known about the factors driving this variation. I argue that state AGs are primarily concerned with achieving electoral and policymaking goals. Consequently, I expect AGs to be responsive to strong consumer interests and to participate in cases with severe infractions. Additionally, whether it is for public interest or electoral goals, AGs should be attracted to cases that promise bigger settlements. My analysis of each state's decision to join each of 172 multi-state lawsuits filed and settled between 1989 and 2002 provides support for each of these hypotheses.

Much of the academic literature that examines U.S. state tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) concludes that TELs are an ineffective mechanism for limiting state spending. However, one shortcoming common to all of these studies is their failure to take into account the incentives of the political actors who enact these TELs. I hypothesize that because of differences in incentives, TELs enacted by citizen initiatives will be more stringent and more effective than TELs passed by state legislatures. An examination of the provisions of the various TELs and a regression analysis support this hypothesis.

College students in the U.S. have long faced barriers to college town registration and voting. Arguably, these barriers raise the costs associated with electoral participation for students living away from home. Despite ongoing debate about where students should vote, the extent to which college town restrictions limit participation by students has never been estimated. This article is the first to demonstrate that college town registration barriers implemented by the U.S. states reduce participation in national elections.

The rapid growth of the Latino population in the U.S. over the past 15 years has led to a significant increase in levels of primary and secondary school enrollment rates of Latino children. Research on Latino education has demonstrated the institutional and contextual challenges faced by this increasingly significant group, but studies that link Latino representation and Latino educational performance have neglected to sort out the direct and indirect effects of representation on student achievement. The central assumption in these studies outlines a causal chain running from Latino political representation (school boards), to Latino bureaucratic representation (administrators and teachers), to Latino student performance. This study tests these theoretical assumptions by employing a path analytic model using data from 1,040 Texas school districts for the years 1997–2001 to tease out the direct and indirect effects of Latino representation on Latino student achievement. We find robust evidence of the impact of Latino political representation on Latino educational attainment in Texas, operating via a direct effect on the number of Latino administrators and teachers and an indirect effect on Latino student performance. Additionally, our results demonstrate that descriptive representation becomes substantive representation in the area of education policy for Latinos and that this relationship remains strong over time. These findings underscore the importance of school board elections and school district hiring practices on Latino student performance.

This article introduces a parsimonious measure of the expressed political orientation of U.S. state governors that compares word choices in their “State of the State” speeches to the language of state and national party platforms. The technique used to generate this measure is Wordscores, a method that relies on the use of reference texts to generate a set of ideal points for gubernatorial rhetoric. I discuss the conventions and substantive content of governors' speeches and the choice of party platforms as reference texts before presenting the average “partisan signal” in speeches by 97 governors in all 50 states between 2000 and 2006.