The COVID-19 pandemic has upended every aspect of American life. State governments responded quickly to protect public health and stabilize overwhelmed hospital systems. The most restrictive policy, the stay-at-home order, was seen by public health officials as a cornerstone of successful state mitigation strategies. But like many aspects of contemporary politics, support for these efforts took on a distinctly partisan hue. In this paper, I argue that party politics significantly affected state policy responses to COVID-19, which in turn limited mitigation efforts. To this point, I first demonstrate that Democratic governors were faster and more likely to adopt stay-at-home orders than Republicans. Next, using a synthetic control approach, I show that these orders caused residents to practice greater social distancing. Finally, I find that greater social distancing worked to “flattened the curve” by limiting the growth of COVID-19 cases. Together these findings show how party politics affected state pandemic responses and have important long-term implications as states begin lifting restrictions.

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.

Over the last 10 years, a great deal of research has been conducted in what had been a neglected field—state legislative campaign finance. Much of this research is motivated by concerns about the impact of money on democracy in state legislative elections. This essay reviews that work critically, looking particularly at studies of spending levels, campaign contributions and fundraising, spending and voting, and campaign finance reform. Comparing campaign finance systems across the states facilitates theory building, provides empirical leverage with which to test hypotheses developed at the congressional level, and allows us to test the efficacy of campaign finance reforms.

Why do state legislators vote the way they do? Which influence is predominant: ideology, party, or public opinion? The implementation votes surrounding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides a unique setting to examine this question, as they make all three considerations highly salient. State roll call votes on ACA implementation were sometimes polarized and sometimes unexpectedly bipartisan. What accounts for the heterogeneity in individual legislator behavior on bills implementing the ACA at the state level? Using new data on legislator ideology and votes from 2011–2015, I show evidence that legislator ideology was by far the most important predictor of voting on implementation votes, far more so than legislator party or public opinion. Moreover, I show the influence of ideology is heterogeneous by issue area and bill.

Judicial elections have two opposing effects on legitimacy perceptions for state supreme courts. Elections not only provide a boost to legitimacy through the chance to hold officials accountable but also involve campaign activity that decreases legitimacy perceptions. This article examines these two opposing effects using a nationally representative survey that includes items assessing diffuse support for state supreme courts. It uses multiple indicators to differentiate between states with highly active election systems involving large amounts of campaign activity and states with less active elections systems that involve little campaign activity. The results from the survey show that the legitimacy of elected courts is higher than appointed courts but only in states with little election activity. In states with high amounts of election activity, the legitimacy of elected courts is lower than appointed courts.

I present a measure of legislative professionalism for 41 states based on the degree to which legislators hold outside careers while in office. Higher salaries and longer sessions alter the incentives and opportunities for legislators to maintain outside careers. Consequently, outside career activity provides a behavioral indicator of professionalism to supplement existing measures based solely on institutional characteristics. I use financial disclosure reports to assess outside interests. Aggregated to the state level, my indicator is highly correlated with institutional measures of professionalism; at the individual level, it varies by sex and age. These findings support hypotheses that outside career choices are influenced by labor market participation and the financial opportunity costs of legislative service.

My article examines whether supermajority vote requirements (SMVR) to raise taxes in California's constitution suppresses state tax burdens. SMVR is a politically popular but contentious measure that 16 states have adopted and many other states have attempted to adopt. The rationale behind the rule is to contain the growth of government by making it costly to form a winning coalition to raise taxes. Nonetheless, the current empirical literature is mixed at best and suffers from causal inference. I take a different approach from extant literature and estimate the causal effect of SMVR on tax burdens in California by using synthetic control methods. The results show that, from 1979 to 2008, SMVR reduced the state nonproperty tax burden by an average of $1.44 per $100 of personal income, which is equivalent to 21% of the total tax burden for each year. The effect of SMVR was immediate after its adoption, but has abated over time.

In the last 30 years, female state legislative representation in the United States has increased steadily and dramatically. While the cross-sectional variation in this representation has been studied at length, longitudinal changes have yet to be explained. We attempt to do this using two theories of large-scale cultural and political attitude change over the last several decades—postmaterialism and post-industrialism. Our empirical analyses are more consistent with post-industrialism theory than postmaterialism theory. We find that both cross-sectional differences and longitudinal changes in the percentage of state legislators who are female are explained primarily by college education and religious adherence, not age cohort or income. The effects of college education and religious adherence remain strong even in the presence of controls for other cultural and institutional variables that have been found to influence the sexual composition of state legislatures. Thus, our study suggests the existence of an education-religion cleavage on social issues among Americans.

By placing lawmaking power directly in the hands of citizens, Progressive movement reformers hoped to undercut the ability of political parties to pursue their policy objectives. This article tests the expectations of reformers by examining whether direct democracy alters the ability of partisan legislative majorities and governors to shape the size of the U.S. state public sector. Using a large dataset, I estimate the determinants of state tax effort and compare across jurisdictions the effects of variables that measure the partisan control of government. The results demonstrate that while the partisanship of elected officials is an important predictor of tax effort in pure representative jurisdictions, the relationship between party and policy disappears among initiative states. This analysis not only adds to our understanding of U.S. state budgeting, but also suggests the widespread adoption of direct democracy as a possible explanation for the weak party effects observed in studies of state fiscal policy.

California is notorious for its budget gridlock. From 1950 to 2008, the budget was adopted late 44% of the time. Although short delays have few consequences, delays in passage have become longer in the last two decades, leading to more severe consequences, such as a lower credit rating and higher borrowing costs. The purpose of this article is to systematically analyze late adoptions of the state budget. I examine annual data from 1901 to 2008 and conduct regression analysis of the length of budget delays, controlling for economic conditions. This study reveals that political and economic conditions, tax policy, and voter-passed initiatives all prolong delays. Interestingly, election years do not reduce budget gridlock despite the potential electoral pressure on the governor and legislature to reach a compromise. I conclude by discussing the study's implications for investigations of budget gridlock in other states and at the national level.

Does the partisanship of officeholders affect environmental outcomes? The popular perception is that Republicans are bad for the environment, but complicating factors like federalism may limit this outcome. Using a dataset that tracks toxic releases over 20 years, we examine how partisan control of executive and legislative branches at both state and federal levels affect environmental policy. Moving beyond the passage of policies or environmental program spending allows us to fully understand the impact of Republicans on the environment. In addition, we take into account structural complications that may shape the relationship between Republican control and environmental outcomes. We find that the conventional wisdom that Republicans are bad for the environment has some validity, but it is dependent on what offices Republican elected officials occupy. More specifically, Republicans significantly affect toxic chemical releases when occupying governorships and controlling Congress. Our conclusions provide further insight into understanding how partisanship affects environmental outcomes, including how partisanship composition across the federal system matters.

The American states have pursued several different approaches to create jobs and foster economic development, including reducing the social cost of labor. I show that state labor costs are markedly lower in 1995 than in 1970, based on a factor analysis of wages and state regulations affecting unions and the cost of labor. Corporate low-wage strategies, international and interstate competition for business, and the growing weakness of labor unions are posited to account for this. But regression analysis shows that lower labor costs have had no significant impact on rates of job creation since 1980, have reduced unemployment only slightly, and have been less effective in the latter respect than either tax cuts or other economic development policies. Moreover, reducing labor costs can have adverse consequences, such as rising income inequality, slower growth in gross state product and productivity, and a less competitive position for states in the international economy.

Across the United States over time, numbers of registered interest groups have continued to increase, but these populations mask the total amount of lobbying that is occurring within America's statehouses. Among registered interests, average numbers of hired lobbyists have increased markedly since the late 1980s. This study both quantifies this increase and identifies a set of causal variables. Previous studies have proposed a variety of short-term, political and long-term, institutional factors that govern rates of lobbying. Using a new data set spanning multiple decades, I find that changes in lobbying can largely be ascribed to institutional variables, including the implementation of term limits and regulations on lobbying. Lobby regulations, one-party dominance, and legislative expenditures also appear to play a role in determining rates of multiclient lobbying. Direct democracy and state spending do not affect the hiring of lobbyists by registered interest groups.

This article demonstrates how the party identification of various demographic groups in California and Texas changed in response to the gubernatorial campaigns of Pete Wilson and George W. Bush. Using aggregated time series of Field Poll, Texas Poll, and Gallup data, difference-in-differences results show that Wilson's embrace of Proposition 187 was followed by significant Hispanic movement toward the Democratic Party in California. Time series analysis substantiates that this action led to a long-term 7.1 percentage point Democratic shift among California's Hispanics. This suggests that state-level actors can influence partisan coalitions in their state, beyond what would be expected from national-level factors.

This study examines lobbying activity during four California policymaking processes and through the four institutional venues available in that state: the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and the ballot initiative. It shows that past advocacy activity explains future mobilization on the same policy issue. Groups that fail to reach their policy goals will be more likely to mobilize later if the policy process changes venue, compared with those that have achieved their policy preference. Thus, the availability of multiple venues provides a counterweight to the possible advantages received by certain group types in each venue. Furthermore, public interest groups are more likely to mobilize across venues and repeatedly within a venue, while business groups are less likely to do so.

Scholars have argued that female legislators are more prone to collaborate than their male counterparts. Though collaboration may be more or less evident in particular situations, we seek to more clearly establish the mechanism behind women’s collaborative activity using the framework of marginalization. In this paper, we use cosponsorship data from 74 state legislative chambers from 2011–2014 to analyze collaborative patterns and mobilizing institutions. We find female legislators are more collaborative than men, and that their collaborative advantage strengthens in chambers where women are systematically excluded from leadership positions. The advantage also extends to bipartisan collaboration, but only in less polarized settings with women’s caucuses. Furthermore, our findings imply that as women are integrated into leadership collaboration will actually decline, especially within their own party. We believe these results are important for understanding both the roots of collaborative behavior among female legislators and consequences of chambers that marginalize women from leadership positions.

In this paper, I introduce a new dataset of individual-level professional background data for state legislators in 98 chambers from 1993 to 2012. Using this data, I examine trends in the professional backgrounds of state legislators over the period of the study, with attention to institutional factors such as professionalism and legislative turnover and individual-level factors such as political party and gender. In addition, I briefly illustrate three applications of the data. First, I analyze the extent to which district-level demographic and political factors affect the probability that a district will elect a legislator from certain backgrounds. Second, I examine the relationship between occupational background and ideology, identifying the backgrounds that identify moderate and extreme members in each party. Third, I contrast the occupational backgrounds of legislators who hold leadership positions with the membership at large. Taken together, these examples speak to some of the ways in which the composition of state legislatures can reveal interesting and relevant information underlying legislative behavior and institutions.

The Christian Right is a powerful force in contemporary state Republican party politics. In this article, I create a new comprehensive measure of that influence and offer a theoretical framework through which to understand how influence varies across the states. Drawing from the insights of social movement theory, the results of the data analysis demonstrate the importance of the movement's internal resources and the state political context in which the Christian Right seeks to influence state Republican party politics.

In this article, I examine whether a constituency's political brand—defined here as the reputation that white evangelicals and Catholics have for “pro-life” abortion policy—influences the public abortion position taken by members in six U.S. state Houses of Representatives. At issue is whether constituent political brand functions as a non-interest group influence on state legislators. A fitting of the brand literature to the state politics domain suggests that the effect of political brand might be dependent on constituent presence in a state House district—be it the relative size of the constituency or its organizational (church-based) cohesion. Results confirm the influence of constituent political brand and point to white evangelicals as having an influence on a member's abortion position based on the size and homogeneity of their constituency. Catholics possess brand influence as well, but theirs is powered by the church's organizational—parish—presence and cohesion in U.S. state House districts. These findings suggest that the two major “pro-life” constituencies in American politics are able to leverage brand in the political realm in ways that the literature has not previously considered.

Conventional wisdom suggests that incumbent politicians use the resources of office to create an electoral advantage. But Cox and Katz (2002) argue that at least part of this incumbency advantage in the United States House of Representatives can be attributed to the strategic entry and exit decisions of incumbents. We test this claim by taking advantage of the natural experiment provided by state legislative term limits in California. By comparing different types of open seats, we identify the strategic component of the incumbency advantage that exists above and beyond the resource-based advantage. The vote loss suffered by the incumbent party is smaller in term-limited seats than in voluntary open seats, indicating that incumbents do sometimes leave when their electoral prospects look dim. Further evidence of this strategic component is that quality challengers run more often in voluntary open seats, while quality incumbent-party replacements run disproportionately in term-limited seats.