Graduate schools develop research skills primarily by teaching future social scientists quantitative and qualitative research methods. A solid understanding of these methods is necessary for conducting reliable research. Yet, these skills are unusable if we cannot access data in the first place. The goal of this article is to help researchers reduce some of the barriers to collecting data by describing several methods for obtaining data from state and local agencies.

This essay places state supreme courts in state politics by tracking some of the major lines of research on these important institutions, documenting the importance of state supreme courts, and illustrating important variations among state supreme courts on a host of factors, including docket composition, the exercise of judicial review, litigant patterns, and turnover rates. Through analyses of original data on separation-of-powers relationships in the abortion controversy, it also provides a brief empirical demonstration of how courts influence and are influenced by the political and policy processes operating in the states, and how comparative research helps resolve fundamental controversies in political science. We conclude that there is a remarkable and unfortunate asymmetry between the political importance of state supreme courts and the attention given to them by the research community. Moreover, by capitalizing on the analytical advantages of comparative state judicial politics scholarship, scholars will be able to solve some of the most complex puzzles in the study of state politics.

Term limits provide a rare opportunity to employ pre- and post-intervention research designs to investigate the effects of turnover in legislatures. This article describes a study of term limits in Michigan that takes advantage of this opportunity. With eight states implementing term limits in 2002 or soon thereafter, there are opportunities for other scholars to replicate all or parts of the study described here. The payoffs for such projects in terms of generating systematic answers to the impacts of legislative turnover and term limits are considerable.

The surveys of Senate races from 1988 to 1992 conducted by the American National Election Study include a number of issue questions that can be aggregated to measure state public opinion. A simple-to-compute coefficient is used to judge the aggregated reliability of these measures. A comparison of these state public opinion measures on specific issues to more general indicators, such as state ideology and partisanship, demonstrates their usefulness in obtaining a richer depiction of public preferences for studies of state politics.

The State Politics and Policy Data Archive is a free-access, web-based archive of publication-related datasets focusing on comparative American state politics and policy research. This essay describes the utility of the archive, provides instruction on its use, and requests that readers contribute data.