Identifying the geographic constituencies of representatives is among the most crucial, yet challenging, aspects of state and local politics research. Regularly changing district lines, incomplete data, and computational obstacles can present barriers to matching individuals to their respective districts. Geocoding residential addresses is the ideal method for matching purposes. However, cost constraints can limit its applicability for many researchers, leading to geographic assignment methods that use polygonal units, such as ZIP codes, to estimate constituency membership. In this study, we quantify the trade-offs between three geographic assignment matching methods – centroid, geographic overlap, and population overlap matching – on the assignment of individual voters to state legislative districts. We confirm that population overlap matching produces the highest accuracy in assigning voters to their state legislative districts when polygonal location data are all that is available. We validate this finding by improving model estimates of lobbying influence through a replication analysis of Bishop and Dudley (2017), “The Role of Constituency, Party, and Industry in Pennsylvania’s Act 13,” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 17 (2): 154–79. Our replication suggests that distinguishing between out-of-district and in-district donations reveals a greater impact for in-district lobbying efforts. We make evident that population overlap assignment can confidently be used to identify constituencies when precise location data is not available.

In this article, we develop and make available measures of public ideology in 2010 for the 50 American states, 435 congressional districts, and state legislative districts. We do this using the geospatial statistical technique of Bayesian universal kriging, which uses the locations of survey respondents, as well as population covariate values, to predict ideology for simulated citizens in districts across the country. In doing this, we improve on past research that uses the kriging technique for forecasting public opinion by incorporating Alaska and Hawaii, making the important distinction between ZIP codes and ZIP Code Tabulation Areas, and introducing more precise data from the 2010 Census. We show that our estimates of ideology at the state, congressional district, and state legislative district levels appropriately predict the ideology of legislators elected from these districts, serving as an external validity check.

Unlike most other countries, in the United States, subnational governments (states) have substantial authority over collective bargaining and union organization laws. Because states compete for business investment and union (dis)organization likely has spillover effects beyond state borders, weak unions in one state may affect union organization in other states. We examine how union decline in one state is associated with union decline in neighboring states, and whether the presence of prounion (left-leaning) governments may limit the spread of union decline. Examining a period of major union decline (1983-2014), we find that union weakness in one state is associated with union weakness in nearby states. We observe that Democratic power in Congress is associated with higher unionization rates, but that liberal state governments have been relatively powerless to stop union decline in this period. These findings have important implications for understanding the historical and contemporary weakness of American unions and for the future of union strength in the United States.

Charter schools enjoy support among Republican and Democratic lawmakers in states and Congress, but little research has examined their support among the electorate. We take advantage of Washington's 2012 charter school ballot initiative—the first voter-approved charter initiative in the United States—to shed light on the politics of school choice at the mass level. Because in-depth, individual-level voter data are often unavailable in state-level elections, we leverage extensive precinct- and district-level data to examine patterns of support and opposition toward the charter school initiative, focusing on how partisanship, ideology, and demographic factors serve to unify or divide voters. Our analysis reveals that the coalition of supporters cut across usual partisan and demographic cleavages, producing somewhat strange bedfellows. This finding has important implications for the strategies advocacy groups may consider as they seek to expand or limit school choice programs via ballot initiatives as opposed to the statehouse, and provides suggestive evidence regarding the evolving shapers of voter support for school choice and ballot initiatives more generally.

This article contributes to our understanding of policy diffusion in two ways. First, by explicitly focusing on the competition mechanism of diffusion, I consider how policy externalities contribute to free-rider dynamics or competitive races across the American states. The second contribution is the focus on the interdependence of the early stages of agenda setting as well as policy enactments. Using a unique dataset on four different types of tobacco policies that are introduced and eventually enacted in the states from 1990 to 2010, I find evidence that states engage in free-riding dynamics and that strategic interaction exists in the early stages of agenda setting. There is also evidence that states respond to legitimate policy threats in neighboring states. Overall, the results stress the importance of scholars to explore the conditional nature of policy diffusion dynamics by focusing on variations in policy content and stages of the policymaking process other than policy enactment.

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.