Elementary and secondary education policy making in the U.S. states is heavily influenced by the political bargaining of various actors, with teacher unions one of the most important actors. Yet previous studies that assess the impact of teacher unions on education reform use problematic measures of their direct political influence, instead opting for broader measures of membership or collective bargaining power. By contrast, the authors measure teacher union political activity by calculating the percentage of campaign contributions to candidates for state office that come from teacher unions. Using this measure, the authors find that increased teacher union political activity greatly reduces the chances that states enact reform-oriented education policies such as school choice and performance pay for teachers, while previous measures of teacher union strength bear little relationship to a state's adoption of these reform policies. These findings highlight the importance of paying careful attention to how political influence is operationalized in studies that assess the role organized interests play in shaping U.S. state policies.

Over the past 30 years, the U.S. states have increased their participation as amici curiae significantly, in addition to winning more of their cases as direct parties. However, little attention has been paid to the factors that cause amici participation rates to vary among the states. The author examines the decision of state attorneys general (AGs) to initiate or join amicus curiae briefs in all 253 U.S. Supreme Court criminal procedure cases from 1990 through 2001. He hypothesizes that AGs are motivated largely by their own policy preferences and by their motivation to get reelected. Because amicus briefs are not particularly high-profile policy tools, reelection motivations ought to be demonstrated through responsiveness to elites in state government. The findings provide less support for this idea and more support for the idea that state AGs follow their own policy preferences through amicus participation.

Contrary to media reports, California's 2003 recall election was anything but a circus. Despite the presence of 135 candidates, just 3 managed to split 94% of the vote, and the winner came close to achieving a majority. In this article, the author uses elite interviews and a social network analysis of campaign donations to study how the Republican Party sought to impose order on the potentially chaotic political environment. The author finds that a network of Republican donors, activists, and officeholders coordinated their efforts to advantage Arnold Schwarzenegger and pressure other Republicans out of the race.

State politics researchers commonly employ ordinary least squares (OLS) regression or one of its variants to test linear hypotheses. However, OLS is easily influenced by outliers and thus can produce misleading results when the error term distribution has heavy tails. Here we demonstrate that median regression (MR), an alternative to OLS that conditions the median of the dependent variable (rather than the mean) on the independent variables, can be a solution to this problem. Then we propose and validate a hypothesis test that applied researchers can use to select between OLS and MR in a given sample of data. Finally, we present two examples from state politics research in which (1) the test selects MR over OLS and (2) differences in results between the two methods could lead to different substantive inferences. We conclude that MR and the test we propose can improve linear models in state politics research.

Political campaigns are dynamic struggles between candidates to define the informational context for voters. Although much research describes how campaigns unfold or explores their effects on voters, less attention has been given to developing and testing a dynamic theory of candidate interaction during campaigns. In this study, the authors examine three different theories of candidate behavior, testing each using data on the TV advertisements aired in 23 gubernatorial elections held in 2002. The analysis examines both the total advertising efforts and the total negative advertising efforts of candidates in these races, differentiating between candidates based on partisanship, incumbency status, and whether they won or lost. The authors find support for all three theories, demonstrating their complementary nature and the value of analyzing campaigns as dynamic processes.

Since the Civil War, the president's party has lost seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in all but three midterm election cycles. Many attribute this pattern to “balancing” by moderate voters who prefer a Democratic Congress when Republicans control the White House, and vice versa. Although a number of scholars have tested the balancing hypothesis, the debate remains unsettled. We argue that the U.S. states provide an excellent way to analyze the issue further. Similar to the national government, states feature an executive and (in most cases) a bicameral legislature whose members come up for election in both gubernatorial and state midterm years. If voters balance, one should observe such behavior in state elections when an executive's partisanship is known and a legislative choice is necessary. We examine state legislative elections from 1978 to 2009 and find evidence consistent with the balancing hypothesis.

Much of the academic literature that analyzes U.S. state-level restrictions on abortion focuses on parental involvement laws and the extent to which abortion is publicly funded through Medicaid. However, one shortcoming common to all of these studies is that they fail to analyze informed consent laws and other types of anti-abortion legislation that received constitutional protection through the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992). In this study, a series of regressions on a comprehensive time series cross-sectional data set provides evidence that several types of state-level anti-abortion legislation result in statistically significant declines in both the abortion rate and the abortion ratio. Furthermore, a series of natural experiments provide further evidence that abortion restrictions are correlated with reductions in the incidence of abortion.

The passage of a restrictive immigration law in Arizona in 2010 rekindled an old debate in the United States on immigration policy and the role of federalism. Despite periodic constitutional controversies, scholars of federalism and U.S. state politics have not adequately explained variation in state-level policy making on immigration. The authors explore pressures leading to state immigration policy innovation and adoption in the United States. The article evaluates factors leading to the introduction and adoption of two types of policies: those dictating the cultural and economic incorporation of immigrants and those attempting to control their flow and settlement. Factors such as fiscal federalism, ethnic contact, and ethnic threat generate incentives for states to pass such laws. The authors compiled a comprehensive data set of state immigration laws from the past decade to explain how factors commonly associated with national immigration policy development—economic conditions, rates of immigration, demographics, party control, and political institutions—influence state-level immigration policy activity.

The creation of racial/ethnic majority-minority districts lies at the heart of debates regarding the utility of descriptive representation for minority policy advocacy. The general puzzle that emerges from these debates, however, rests on the possibility that by electing representatives who are policy outsiders, minority interests would exert little influence in the policy decisions of median-dominated institutions. The authors present a model that shows how majority-minority districts can act to (1) increase the likelihood of electing minority representatives who are unique policy advocates and (2) concurrently increase the level of institutional status of descriptive representatives. The empirical analysis employs a novel data set of observations on political, sociodemographic, roll-call and institutional position, covering twenty U.S. states in the late 1990s and over 2,600 state legislative seats to show how majority-minority districts produce policy outsiders as well as institutional insiders.

What led elites in some U.S. states to surrender policy-making power to voters between 1898 and 1918, while leaders elsewhere retained only representative democracy? The authors argue that progressives behaved as strategic politicians by supporting direct democracy when they were stymied at achieving their goals in the legislature and were confident that the voters who would be empowered by initiatives that agreed with progressive policies. They made their delegation of power conditional on who would receive it. The presence of these underlying conditions made adoption of the citizen initiative likely, the authors posit, while the timing of reforms came when insurgent reformers had a strong presence in state government, when the results of a galvanizing election sent a clear signal, or when the adoption of the initiative in one state diffused to its neighbors. Exploring these hypotheses by analyzing a new data set, the authors find strong support for their expectations about the conditions that created fertile ground for direct democracy.

The authors use an informational-theoretical perspective to examine the appointment of legislative committees, using new measures of knowledge and expertise as well as a unique database. While competing theories (distributive and partisan) do not deny that legislative committees are a source of vital knowledge and expertise necessary for legislative policy making, information theory places the wisdom and expertise needs of collective decision making—that is, specialization—on very complex topics by legislative generalists as the raison d'être for a committee system. Thus, the authors investigate one of the fundamental arguments of information theory—that committees are formed to meet the basic knowledge and expertise needs of a legislative body. The findings from U.S. state legislative data indicate that significant member differences regarding prior knowledge and expertise exist by committee jurisdiction, state, and session, reinforcing the applicability of information theory while also suggesting the impact of setting and organizational factors. The authors also explore implications of these findings.

The author improves on the measurement of U.S. state public opinion by (1) applying previous methods used only on cross-sectional data to create dynamic measures of state public opinion and (2) providing a systematic comparison of the performance of the various methodological approaches on these dynamic measures. The author shows that scholars can use multilevel regression, imputation, and poststratification (MRP) coupled with a simple moving average to measure state public opinion over time. Compared to aggregation, the MRP approach has less error and is more reliable, particularly for the less populated states. The author shows the applicability of the MRP approach by measuring and validating state partisanship and state ideology over time. The validated measures are available for public use. Armed with a method to measure state public opinion over time, scholars can begin to more fully understand the dynamic relationship between public opinion and policy in the U.S. states.

The authors examine the impact of political party control of government on the restrictiveness of a U.S. state's abortion policy, measured by the enactment of a parental involvement law. The empirical results show that (1) institutional control of a state's legislative and executive branches of government by the Republican Party increases the likelihood a state will enact a parental involvement law, while Democratic Party control decreases this likelihood; (2) the more conservative state public opinion is on abortion rights, the more likely a state is to enact a parental involvement law; (3) public anti-abortion attitudes do not act as a moderating force on the link between political party control and the enactment of a parental involvement law; and (4) the impact of political party control on the enactment of a parental involvement law has grown larger over time.

We explore the effects of state-level election reforms on voter turnout in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections. Using a cost-benefit model of political participation, we develop a framework for analyzing the burdens imposed by the following: universal mail voting, permanent no-excuse absentee voting, nonpermanent no-excuse absentee voting, early in-person voting, Election Day registration, and voter identification requirements. We analyze turnout data from the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Current Population Surveys and show that implementation by states of both forms of no-excuse absentee voting and Election Day registration has a positive and significant affect on turnout in each election. We find positive but less consistent effects on turnout for universal mail voting and voter identification requirements. Our results also show that early in-person voting has a negative and statistically significant correlation with turnout in all three elections.

How does the demand for lobbying reflected by government policy activity influence the use of lobbying strategies and tactics? The authors examine this question by assessing how the complexity of the policy space affects the political action committee (PAC) system. They hypothesize that the complexity of the policy space indirectly affects the size and activity of the PAC system through its direct effect on interest organization density. The authors test this hypothesis within the health sector using a unique data set that connects individual interest organizations registered to lobby U.S. state legislatures with active PACs in the state. It appears that social, economic, and political measures of policy space complexity influence the size of the lobbying community, which in turn influences the size and activity of the PAC community.

One common critique of direct democracy posits that minority rights are endangered by institutions like ballot initiatives and referenda. Empirical research testing this claim, however, has produced conflicting results that leave the question of direct democracy's effect on minority rights open to debate. This study extends previous research by providing a more direct test of this criticism—it compares anti-minority policy proposals from direct democracy states to similar proposals from states without direct democracy institutions. The author examines both ballot proposals and traditional legislative bills to account for both the direct and indirect effects of direct democracy. Analyzing anti-minority proposals from all 50 states from 1995 to 2004 shows that direct democracy states are more likely to pass these proposals than states without direct democracy institutions.

Many theories of policy diffusion contend that the flow of information is the driving force in the diffusion process. Prior scholarship has identified at least two types of information: information about policy and information about political viability. Few empirical approaches have been able to distinguish between these separate mechanisms. The authors argue that an analysis of policy proposals can untangle political information from policy-based information. They employ their strategy with data on the proposal of tax and expenditure limits (TELs) in the U.S. states since 1970 through direct democracy. The authors find that states in close geographic proximity to states that have rejected TELs are significantly less likely to propose TELs themselves. Since this event does not reveal information about policy effectiveness, the authors conclude that information about political viability systematically diffuses from state to state at the proposal stage of policy making.

This article examines the role of society and culture in shaping the opportunity structure and ambition formation of female gubernatorial candidates in all 50 states over a 40-year period. Using a new data set consisting of every woman who entered a gubernatorial primary from 1978 to 2008, the author analyzes how cultural factors and historical legacies—including the percentage of women in the workforce, higher education, and statewide elective offices—influence the opportunity structure and ambition formation of female candidates. The author argues that the female sociopolitical subculture within individual states heavily influences whether or not female candidates will enter and win their respective primaries and general elections. Rather than assuming that individual characteristics are the primary determinants of ambition formation, this research implies that it is necessary to analyze the political behavior within cultural contexts.

U.S. state politics researchers often analyze data with observations grouped into clusters. This structure commonly produces unmodeled correlation within clusters, leading to downward bias in the standard errors of regression coefficients. Estimating robust cluster standard errors (RCSE) is a common approach to correcting this bias. However, despite their frequent use, recent work indicates that RCSE can also be biased downward. Here the author provides evidence of that bias and offers a potential solution. Through Monte Carlo simulation of an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model, the author compares conventional standard error (OLS-SE) and RCSE performance to that of a bootstrap method that resamples clusters of observations (BCSE). The author shows that both OLS-SE and RCSE are biased downward, with OLS-SE being the most biased. In contrast, BCSE are not biased and consistently outperform the other two methods. The author concludes with three replications from recent work and offers recommendations to researchers.

While there is a growing literature on the factors linked to the power held by leaders in state legislatures, the complexity of leadership power as a concept makes assessing it difficult. The author demonstrates that measures of formal leadership power derived from the written rules are uncorrelated with survey measures capturing legislators' own assessments of their leader's strength. These differences have practical importance, with each type of measure yielding different substantive findings in models predicting leadership power.