Scholarly research finds that partisan, hard-fought, expensive, and churlish state supreme court campaigns increase voter participation and their support for challenger candidates. These insights, however, are drawn nearly exclusively from competitive state supreme court elections. Little is known about voter behavior in uncompetitive retention elections. Traditionally, these races are not salient to the public given that incumbents raise and spend little-to-no money, and campaigns, parties, and political action committees air few (if any) advertisements. Since 2010, however, such behavior has become more commonplace. I assess voter participation and incumbent performance in 178 state supreme court retention elections from 2002 to 2014. I find that expensive, churlish retention elections are likely to increase voter turnout and to hurt incumbents' efforts to win retention.

Do the occupational backgrounds of politicians affect the government's agenda? Businesses have long thought so. The first occupational data on state legislators were collected by the Insurance Information Institute, an interest group representing major insurance companies. In this paper, we test one potential motive for these kinds of efforts: the idea that the occupational makeup of governments affects the agendas they pursue, an argument that has been largely neglected in research on politicians' occupational backgrounds. We focus here on the insurance industry. Using original data, we find that state legislatures with more former insurers consider fewer bills regulating insurance (negative agenda control), that former insurers play a disproportionate role in drafting the insurance bills that are introduced (positive agenda control), and that the bills former insurers introduce tend to be more favorable to the industry than those that their colleagues introduce (positive agenda control). The occupational makeup of legislatures may indeed affect their agendas, as industry groups have long suspected.

Is there an opposition bias in ballot initiative campaigns? While some early research suggested that the “no” side was advantaged in ballot initiative campaigns, recent work has demonstrated that both opposition and support spending in ballot measure campaigns are effective. We offer a new way to conceptualize status quo orientation in ballot measure elections. Specifically, we argue that opposition arguments are more effective than support arguments because of the well-known framing negativity bias and not because the starting position for uninformed voters is to default to no. We present the results of two survey experiments to test the impact of support and opposition arguments in ballot initiative campaigns. We find consistent evidence that opposition arguments are effective in generating more “no” votes and that support arguments are ineffective in generating more “yes” votes.

Integrating a diversity of stakeholder voices in policymaking processes can lead to more legitimate and widely supported laws and rules. While most attention to stakeholder participation in public decision processes has focused on legislative policymaking or the role of industry stakeholders in regulatory processes, strategic choices about participation by non-industry stakeholders in rulemaking remains largely overlooked, particularly at the state level. Previous research shows that agency rulemaking processes often provide greater procedural access to industry actors, who may significantly influence final rule content by bringing greater technical knowledge to bear on rulemaking processes. Less is understood about the strategies used by non-industry stakeholders, such as environmental advocacy groups, to influence regulatory decisions. This study, which compares environmental rulemaking processes across three issues in five states, finds that industry actors and environmental advocacy groups both use a variety of participation strategies classically thought to be “insider” and “outsider” strategies, and that these choices are motivated by reasons other than the perceived effectiveness of the strategy within the formal rulemaking process.

Although many studies on budgetary outcomes of state politics focus on budget sizes, budget trade-off studies focus on budget composition. This study examines the role of state politics in explaining budget trade-offs. We apply Peterson's typology to analyze budget trade-offs among developmental, allocational, redistributive, and educational expenditures. We focus on the roles of partisan and ideological factors and their interactive effects with institutional limits. Results show that politics matters. The Democratic Party and liberal citizen ideology increase state spending in redistribution relative to other categories, while the Republican Party shifts state budgets toward developmental spending. Partisan effects increase when tax and expenditure limits become less restrictive. Using more recent data and improved measurements, this study explains trade-offs among theoretically meaningful expenditure categories with a comprehensive model while providing a test of Peterson's typology.

One of the most important career decisions for a legislator is the decision to switch parties, and it raises a theoretical puzzle: it carries significant risk, yet sometimes legislators do change partisan affiliation. We elucidate this puzzle with the first-ever systematic comparison of the entire careers of state legislative switchers and non-switchers in the American South, where the high prevalence of party switching coincided with rapid realignment toward the Republican Party. Our analysis is the first to evaluate all post-switch career decisions (retiring, running for reelection, running for higher office) simultaneously, and it is the broadest in its scope with two full decades of career data. We demonstrate that converts to the Grand Old Party (GOP) pay a reelection cost. However, they are less likely to retire than Democratic non-switchers and more likely to seek higher office. This latter finding is especially strong during the earlier part of our study—when the Republican bench in the South was not as deep and competition for the party label was not as intense. Our findings suggest that political ambition motivates legislators to trade short-term electoral costs for a more promising long-term electoral career with the ascendant party.