The state courts of last resort are vital components of American judicial system, disposing of many important legal matters. The chief justices of these courts serve consequential roles in these institutions. Although scholars have examined the selection and duties of states' chief justices, their interactions with the elected branches are understudied. We focus on how chief justices on state high courts use their roles to encourage judicial reform. Specifically, we examine the determinants of chief justices' successes or failures as advocates for their justice systems. To analyze why chief justices succeed or fail as reform advocates, we analyze the fate of reform proposals offered in state of the judiciary addresses. Our results indicate that greater ideological similarity between the state legislature and chief justice or state supreme court median increases the odds of an agenda item being enacted. We also find that the scope of a policy request influences the likelihood it will be granted.

Using data from nearly 5,000 votes cast by more than 400 judges in courts of last resort from all 50 states, we investigate whether there is a relationship between a state's judicial retention method and the likelihood that a judge votes to join a precedent-overturning majority. We find that relative to judges retained by institutions such as judicial commissions or state legislatures, those retained via either partisan or retention elections are significantly more likely to join majorities that overturn precedent. Most of this effect is due to behavior in high-profile cases that garner media attention. We find little evidence that an impending election moderates these effects. Finally, we find no evidence that judges retained via nonpartisan elections treat precedent differently than their institutionally retained colleagues.

A substantial body of empirical work documents the influence of federal monies on state policy making. Less attention, however, has been paid to the conditioning effects of states' prior financial health. Nearly always, apportioned monies cover only a fraction of the costs of federal policy reforms. The capacity of states to deploy supplementary resources, therefore, may inform the willingness of states to comply with the federal government's policy objectives. Focusing on Barack Obama's Race to the Top (RttT) initiative, we present new evidence that state responses to federal initiatives that carry financial rewards systematically vary with the amount of resources already on hand. States that survived the Great Recession with their education budgets largely intact, we find, tended to implement more RttT reforms overall, and especially more reforms that required substantial up-front financial commitments. These patterns of policy adoptions can be meaningfully attributed to RttT, are not the result of either prior or ancillary policy trends, and speak to the general importance of accounting for what states already have, above and beyond what the federal government is willing to offer, when studying the financial incentives of vertical diffusion.

This article explores diversity within top leadership positions in state governments, specifically, the role that position selection method plays in promoting the inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities into positions of power. We hypothesize that minorities will be more likely to serve in appointed positions as governors consider diversity in making appointments and less likely to serve in elected positions due to the additional hurdles for candidates of color. Using an original data set of state executive leaders from 2001 to 2017 from all 50 states, we find evidence that institutional design influences levels of diversity among state executive leaders. Racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to be appointed than elected to state executive leadership positions. In addition, we find that Democratic governors are more likely than Republican governors to appoint minorities. Ultimately, this evidence is important for understanding how institutional design can have consequences for descriptive representation, specifically for groups that have been historically excluded from political life.

I argue that the value of a particular set of committee assignments for a legislator is dependent on that legislator's policy interests. By this, I mean that “good” assignments will match committee policy jurisdictions with member policy priorities. I develop this concept of committee-agenda matching and present a measure of this match for legislators in 12 state lower chambers. After some brief measure validation, I present a substantive application, demonstrating that this match poses serious consequences for individual legislator's ability to shepherd their bills through the legislative process.