Interjurisdictional pollution spillovers are a critical issue in U.S. environmental policy. When policy responsibility is decentralized, state governmental agencies have incentives to promote these externalities in order to capture the benefits of economic activity within their borders while compelling neighbors to shoulder the resultant environmental costs. To test this free riding hypothesis, prior studies have relied on crude proxies to delineate a regulated entity's proximity to a neighboring state. In this article, we develop a more refined set of measures using newly available data on facility location to isolate the conditions under which free riding is theoretically more likely to occur. We then assess state enforcement of the federal Clean Water Act directed at major water polluters under these conditions to determine the extent to which U.S. states engage in environmental free riding behavior. Our empirical results are mixed, but in general they fail to support theoretical expectations generated by the free rider argument.

This study creates and empirically tests an integrated model of trial court decision making to explore the hypothesis that jury verdicts reflect the social, political, and economic attributes of the community in which the court resides. In addition, the analyses examine the influence of attorneys, litigants, case facts, and judges on trial outcomes. Using an original data set comprising all reported civil trial verdicts decided in the state of Alabama from 2002 to 2008, we uncover strong evidence that community composition influences both the dispute resolution and resource allocation functions of trial courts. This research improves our knowledge of trial court decision making and contributes to our theoretical understanding of the effect of extralegal factors on the performance of political institutions.

Using research on the initiative as a point of comparison, we consider how frequently and for what ends state legislators use the referendum. Akin to initiative use, we find that legislators are constrained by procedural hurdles in their ability to place referendums on the ballot. However, in contrast to research on the initiative, which emphasizes the role of interest groups as the drivers of initiatives, our analysis suggests that referendum use is motivated by partisan legislative majorities seeking to achieve a mix of political and policy goals.

In this study we examine black voting in the 2008 presidential election. Recognizing the significance of having an African American win the presidency, we evaluate black political attitudes in 2008 vis-à-vis 2004, place black turnout in historical context, and discuss the problem of vote overreporting. The issue of vote overreporting plagues surveys, and this is particularly notable among African American respondents. The momentousness of Barack Obama's candidacy and subsequent election may further complicate black turnout responses. On the one hand, an African American Democratic presidential nominee is expected to mobilize blacks, but on the other hand this situation is also expected to increase the social desirability to misreport voting. To get around this intractable problem with surveys, we evaluate validated black turnout in the state of Georgia, which provides individual-level data on the population of registered voters. The validated black turnout numbers are much lower than those reported in national studies like the Current Population Survey, but our analysis indicates that compared to 2004, African American registration and voting in Georgia were markedly higher in 2008.

Expansive and restrictive state electoral institutions have been instrumental in structuring the vote throughout American history. Studies focused on a small number of reforms, years, or states lack the scope necessary to comprehensively evaluate the effects of institutional change over time. This work, however, places recent reforms in historical context and offers a long-term perspective. Using an original data set, it identifies the institutions that have generated the most substantial effects on state turnout rates during presidential elections from 1920 to 2000. Findings demonstrate that restrictive laws (those aiming to limit the vote or make voting more costly) produced large and consistently negative effects in the Southern and non-Southern states alike, but the effects associated with expansive reforms (those making participation more convenient or less costly) vary. Although a few expansive laws have increased turnout in the non-Southern states, they have had no effect in the Southern states where turnout rates are lowest.

Previous research has largely concluded that House elections have become less competitive in the modern era. Our research examines one area where we expect to observe more competition—namely, primary elections. In this article, we investigate when and where a state legislator will emerge to run in a congressional primary. All else equal, we expect that state legislators who can carry a large portion of their old state reelection constituency to the “geographic” congressional constituency will be more likely to emerge and receive a higher vote share in the election. Using geographic information systems (GIS) techniques, we are able to derive a measure of constituency congruency by focusing on the degree of intersection between state legislative and congressional districts. Our results indicate that state legislators are more likely to emerge in a primary if constituency congruency is high, especially in open seat contests. Congruency does not appear to provide an electoral advantage at the polls.

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.

Voter identification (ID) policies, especially those of the photo ID variety, have been hotly contested over the last few years. The primary concern surrounding these statutes amounts to lower turnout, especially among certain groups in the electorate, such as racial/ethnic minorities. In 2007, the way was cleared for Georgia to implement a new statute requiring registrants to present a government-issued photo ID to vote. Using population data on registrants from two election cycles coupled with information on a subgroup of registrants known to lack photo ID, we conduct a policy impact analysis of the Georgia voter ID law. We find that the new law did produce a suppression effect among those registrants lacking proper ID. Substantively, the law lowered turnout by about four-tenths of a percentage point in 2008. However, we find no empirical evidence to suggest that there is a racial or ethnic component to this suppression effect.

American state legislators commonly remain connected to the market, giving them the potential for unique expertise on how policy affects the industries they are connected to and the opportunity to help enact laws favoring those industries. This paper describes the extent to which state legislative committees are populated by legislators with economic connections to their jurisdiction, and analyzes appointment patterns to help distinguish stacking to tap expertise from stacking to serve an industry. I find that a substantial minority of committees are stacked with connected legislators. Appointment patterns show limited evidence for expertise in education and health care, for industry service in banking, and for both in agriculture.

In Illinois and Texas, senate elections return members to serve terms of different length. Because term length schedules are randomized, these states provide a natural experiment. Cross-sectional comparison of chambers requires statistical controls for myriad factors that distinguish cases (chambers or periods). These two chambers, by contrast, produce direct evidence of term length's impact on electoral behavior. We test hypotheses about term length's impact on candidacies, campaign expenditures, and voter participation with data from 1968 to 2010. Surprisingly, there is little evidence of any significant differences between contests for two-year and four-year terms.

The popularity and approval of a governor among their state citizenry is a central form of political capital that animates the informal power key to their legislative success and bolsters their prospects for reelection. Within the extant literature exploring the sources of approval of state executives, the lion's share of the work focuses on the deleterious effects on approval of a poorly performing national and state economy. In the present article, we rely on the same logic underlying the economic-centered research—namely, that unhappy citizens blame governors and state governments for their discontent—but focus on the impact on approval of an entirely separate and relatively unexplored domain of life in a state: ethno-demographics. This article advances the hypothesis that citizen discontent over drastic ethnic change in their local environment is politicized as concern over immigration, which in turn serves as a concrete political issue through which personal discontent over increased ethnic diversity is translated into lower approval of state government. This hypothesis is tested within the context of the state of California using pooled statewide survey data. Our analyses demonstrate that growth in the Hispanic population within a respondent's county of residence significantly increases concern over immigration within the state, and that concern over immigration significantly decreases approval of state government across the board, including the governor, the state legislature, and one's local state representatives.

Google Insights for Search provides a new and rich data source for political scientists, which may be particularly useful for state politics scholars. We outline the prior uses of Google Insights for Search in social and health sciences, explain the data-generating process, and test for the first time the validity of this data for state politics research. Our empirical test of validity shows that Google searches for ballot measures' names and topics in state one week before the 2008 Presidential election correlate with actual participation on those ballot measures. This demonstrates that the more Internet searches there were for a ballot measure, the less likely voters were to rolloff (not answering the question), and establishes the construct validity for this data for one important topic in state politics research. We also outline the limitations to this data source.

Immigration remains a powerful and recurrent feature of American politics. Of the issues related to immigration, controversy over government policy for controlling illegal immigration occupies a central position in the debate. One increasingly important and prevalent type of control policy that has received little scholarly attention is worksite employment eligibility enforcement, otherwise known as E-Verify Laws. In the present article, we analyze variation in E-Verify policy adoption across the U.S. states, approaching the topic from multiple theoretical perspectives and testing several hypotheses pertaining to policy enactment. Our analysis points to the critical role of proportionate change in a state's immigrant population, as well as the political activity of immigrant-employing industries, in leading to policy adoption. Despite the use of multiple objective indicators, we fail to find strong evidence supporting the hypothesis that economic distress within a state increases its likelihood of enacting E-Verify legislation. Overall, our analysis contributes to an underdeveloped area of immigration policy research and sheds light on an important contemporary immigration issue, while drawing broader conclusions concerning the factors influencing the emergence of anti-immigration policies more generally.

Numerous scholars have considered the relationship between gubernatorial power and political outcomes. In fact, gubernatorial power has been used as a key explanatory factor in analyses of topics such as gubernatorial approval, divided government, regulation, and even individual political behavior. The key to these studies is the precision with which scholars can measure gubernatorial power and many such studies rely on the Formal Powers Index (FPI)—a measure maintained by Beyle. In this article, we reconsider these commonly used power scores in three parts. First, we argue and show that FPI suffers from a key measurement error that is particularly problematic in analyses of time-series data. Second, we present a new approach to estimating gubernatorial power and explain how this approach deals with the measurement errors in the FPI. Finally, we use our new scores to replicate a study that originally relied on the FPI to analyze the effect of gubernatorial power. Given the prevalence of the FPI in the existing literature, our results have key implications for the study of the effects of gubernatorial power.

To access funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, state governors had to formally certify their intent to do so within 45 days of the law's enactment. All governors eventually certified, but with considerable variation in celerity. This study employs event history techniques to model the probability of certifying the ARRA. It argues that the statute's design combined with economic distress within the states rendered manifest rejection of the law politically infeasible but, for state officials with certain partisan commitments, left open the possibility of symbolic resistance or support in the form of time to certification. State leaders relied on party identification to guide their decisions, resulting in markedly different propensities toward certification for Republican and Democratic governors. Results lend credence to this thesis: States with Republican governors were nearly 60% less likely to certify the ARRA on a given day than states with Democratic governors. This finding suggests that when economic constraints and policy design foreclose actual rejection of a federal law, state policymakers may rely on party labels to register their approbation or disapprobation through other means, including the amount of time taken to accept federal funding.

How do the American states vary in their propensity for innovativeness, or their willingness to adopt new policies sooner or later relative to other states? Most studies today use event history analysis (EHA) to focus almost exclusively on one policy area at a time at the expense of a broader understanding of innovativeness as a characteristic of states. To return to the concept of innovativeness more broadly, our study revisits and updates the original approach taken by Walker by updating his average innovation scores with new data covering more than 180 different policies. We use these data to construct a new, dynamic measure of innovativeness that addresses biases and shortcomings in the original measure and we provide measures of uncertainty for both. These new scores build on the logic of EHA to address issues such as right-censoring and to facilitate measuring changes in innovativeness over time. We then compare the two measures of innovativeness and evaluate differences across states, spatial patterns, and changes in innovativeness over time.

This article sheds new light on policy diffusion by exploring policy complexity in state-level lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) antidiscrimination policies. The multiple component event history approach taken in this research allows for the concurrent study of both policy content and the factors that affect policy adoption. Results reveal that the factors influencing policy adoption vary depending on both the content and scope of the policy in question. In addition to addressing laws that protect gay people from discrimination, this article is one of the first studies in the political science and policy literature to empirically investigate the spread of transgender-inclusive laws. Despite combined advocacy and public conflation of identities, gay and transgender-inclusive laws appear to be influenced by different internal and external factors.

Despite lofty expectations from the item veto's proponents (and fears from its opponents), formal models have suggested that the item veto is unlikely to have much effect beyond what a full veto could render. However, I show that different findings obtain when item vetoes are appreciated more fully as a dimensionality-reducing institution. I begin by developing a package veto model in a generalized multidimensional space. I then show how introducing the item veto changes the outcome by forcing veto bargaining into what is essentially a unidimensional space. As a result, executives with an item veto or other dimensionality-reducing institution (such as a single-subject rule) can be far more powerful in legislative bargaining than executives who lack these tools, other things being equal. I use simulations to demonstrate the model's main implications.

This study uses historical data from the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) to examine the effect of strategic policy making on policy outcomes. Strategic policy making refers to the exploitation of future policy resources by an incumbent government when it anticipates the policy change by a future government. In the South, the segregationist governments immediately after the enactment of the VRA still stayed in office but anticipated the future policy change that would result from minority voters acquiring the right to franchise. This political context provides an ideal setting for testing the theory of strategic policy making. Through analysis of county panel data analysis from the 1960s, this study finds that segregationist governments with large budgets increased long-term debts, education spending, and highway spending significantly when compared with the rest of the country. This finding supports a version of strategic policy making, namely, strategic use of debts, and is consistent with anecdotal evidence indicating that resistance to school integration through the creation of all-white suburban schools is one of the primary motives for bond issues.

American state politics scholars have generally relied on Ranney's measure of the partisan composition of state legislatures and governors' offices to evaluate competition between parties for control of state government, and Holbrook and Van Dunk's measure of the competitiveness of individual state legislative elections to evaluate the degree of electoral competition in a state. Both measure “competition” and were previously correlated with one another, so researchers might be tempted to consider them two measures of the same concept. This would be mistaken, however, because they are measuring two distinct concepts. We use new data on state legislative partisan balance and election returns to compute (and make publicly available) the two measures of competition from 1970 to 2003, a time span that is significantly longer than any previous study. We show that the relationship between the two measures has drastically changed over the last 30 years. Although the two measures were positively correlated in the 1970s and 1980s, they are now (as we might expect, given they are different concepts) negatively correlated. We investigate one possible explanation for this change and conclude by discussing a set of practical recommendations for scholars who plan to incorporate a measure of competition in future studies.