While a large body of research explores the federal-level influences over distributive politics decisions, very little attention has been given to the active role state and local governments play in the geographic distribution of federal funds. Before presidents, legislators, and agency leaders can influence the selection of federal grants, state and local governments must expend time and resources to submit grant proposals. We focus on grant applications as our unit of analysis and advance a theory that congressional representation influences the grant application behavior of state and local governments. We analyze US Department of Transportation grant applications and awards from 2009 to 2022 and find evidence that congressional representation meaningfully influences state-level grant application behavior. States apply more aggressively for federal transportation grants when represented by senators in the Senate majority party, and states apply more efficiently for grants when represented by a senator holding an advantageous committee leadership post.

Political scientists have largely come to a consensus that “most citizens are politically uninformed” (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1997), but even with increased attention to state-level representation and electoral behavior, political scientists know surprisingly little themselves regarding what Americans know about state politics. Past studies of state political knowledge examine narrow domains of knowledge and make few comparisons between individuals’ understanding of national and state politics. To provide a more comprehensive account of Americans’ state political knowledge, I conducted a novel national survey that included over 30 political knowledge questions. In a descriptive and exploratory analysis, I show Americans demonstrated more knowledge about who their Governor is but less knowledge about who represents them in the state legislature, state government institutions, and the state economy, particularly compared to their knowledge of federal politics. The different levels of political knowledge across different domains and levels of government raise concerns for statehouse democracy and should be considered before testing theories at the state level. To guide future research and surveys, I identify political knowledge questions that discriminate well between those who know little, some, and a lot about state politics across different domains of political knowledge.

The Squire Index measuring the professionalization levels of American state legislatures was created three decades ago. In this note, I explain how the 2021 update was compiled. I then document the index’s stability over the years for which it has been measured, present alternative measures to explore a problematic aspect of the index, and finally examine how each of the index’s three components has moved relative to Congress between 1979 and 2021.

In the face of the intensifying global climate crisis, the US has failed to implement comprehensive policies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. During the 2000s, the shale oil and gas extraction (i.e., “fracking”) revolution highlighted the American energy economy. Is the fracking boom partially to blame for US lagging on climate policy? Political economy theory suggests that economic resources are primary drivers of policy outcomes. In this paper, I originally evaluate that claim in the context of the American states, the governments most powerful to mitigate emissions while the federal government faces gridlock. I first introduce an original measure of one state-level climate policy: adoption of the low-emission vehicle (LEV) policy from 1991 to 2015. I then frame the US fracking boom of the mid-to-late 2000s as a natural experiment, employing a difference-in-difference design to compare the effects of fracking on two climate policies across the American states – LEV and renewable electricity policy. Results yield evidence of a causal impact of the fracking boom on state LEV adoption and more suggestive evidence of an impact on renewable electricity mandates. I conclude by arguing that efforts to evaluate the influence of business on policy should account for “structural power” mechanisms.

Executives are important elites, and ideology is important to elite behavior, but measurement challenges and a focus on the presidency have kept scholars from fully exploring executive ideology. This article advocates studying US governors to learn more about executive ideology. It provides an overview of the data scholars can use to measure gubernatorial preferences, and highlights Bonica’s campaign finance-based ideology scores (CFscores) as offering the greatest coverage and allowing common-scale comparisons with other actors. As a validation exercise, I find that CFscores explain within-party variation in other measures and predict the decisions that governors make when in office. Then, I run a preliminary test of the substantive importance of executive ideology. Four models explain state policy liberalism as a function of executive, legislative, and citizen ideology. Gubernatorial preferences emerge as most predictive of the three. These results encourage greater investigation into the role of executive ideology in the policy process.

Recently, scholars of the lawmaking process have urged their colleagues to devote more attention to the potential impact of bill content on legislative outcomes. Heeding their call, this paper builds an original dataset of over 5,000 pieces of state-level legislation addressing issues that span the ideological spectrum. It compares proposals that challenge the authority of the national government in a specific domain to proposals that lack federalism-related implications and finds that the former, all else being equal, make less legislative progress toward enactment. In addition, it categorizes the measures that resist national laws based on the specific nature of the challenge they pose. Its analysis finds that measures that are inconsistent with existing national law but work within the law’s legal framework make more legislative progress than measures that seek to nullify the national law or that vow not to cooperate with it. It also confirms that sponsor characteristics such as majority status, the number of cosponsors, institutional rules such as hearing requirements, and state-level factors like party control of the state legislature affect how much progress proposals make toward enactment. Thus, the paper demonstrates the importance of legislative content as an explanatory factor and sheds light on the nature of intergovernmental relations in the contemporary United States.

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.

States are uniquely situated as both individual governments in the federal system and entities that represent the interests of their citizens. So, what makes groups of states successful when they lobby the Supreme Court as amicus curiae filers? I argue that it is not just the number of states included in a coalition that matters, but rather which states are included. In this article, I offer a theory that implies certain types of coalitions will be more influential than others, as these coalitions can vary in how representative they are of public preferences. I use a dataset on state amicus curiae filings from 1960 to 2013 to test the implications of my theory. I find that the regional diversity of coalitions increases the odds of state amicus curiae filers obtaining their preferred outcome, but the ideological heterogeneity of the group of states does not. This latter result is interesting given that it is contrary to the theoretical expectations of the existing scholarship on state amicus filings.

Considerable research shows that welfare policies are stricter in states with large African American caseloads. We challenge the universality of this claim by extending Soss, Fording, and Schram's Racial Classification Model to account for the multidimensionality of policy, the constraints imposed by federal funding, and state legislators' ideological goals and racial stereotypes. Examining the work requirements, sanctions, time limits, and exemptions in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF), we test our hypotheses using the most detailed measures of state welfare policy yet examined. Consistent with our theory, we show that policy is more generous on some dimensions and less generous on others as the size of the African American caseload increases. This pattern reveals a complexity in welfare policy previously overlooked by research showing only negative effects. The results have important implications for theories addressing race in the context of TANF and other complex policy regimes.

When the U.S. Supreme Court decides to exercise judicial review on a law passed by a democratically elected institution, it can have a profound and critical impact on public policy. Furthermore, recent research shows that the Court more frequently declares state statutes unconstitutional than federal statutes. However, only a limited number of studies have extensively explored this political phenomenon. One aspect of a state that has not been considered in connection with the Supreme Court's use of judicial review over state legislation is the electoral environment in which the laws are produced. We argue that because electoral competition affects the legislative output from a state, it could also influence the likelihood that a state has a statute invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court. When examining all states between 1971 and 2010, we find evidence in support of our theoretical expectation. Specifically, we find that an increase in electoral competition corresponds to an increased likelihood that a state has a statute invalidated by the Supreme Court. This finding contributes to our understanding of the Supreme Court's use of judicial review, and it also suggests that electoral pressure can incentivize states to craft unconstitutional public policy.

I examine how courts condition the relationship between state-level public opinion and policy. The system of federalism in the United States allows federal and state courts to establish the types of policies that states are constitutionally allowed to implement. In particular, federal courts can set “federal floors” for policy, below which no states can go. State courts, in turn, can raise the level of this floor. Thus, both federal and state courts shape whether state policy can match the preferences of the median voter in a given state. Analyzing data on public opinion, judicial decisions, and state-level policy on the issue of abortion, from 1973 to 2012, I show that changes in the set of allowable abortion restrictions, according to the combined decisions of state and federal courts, significantly affect whether states implement majority-preferred policies. I also show that ignoring the influence of courts on the policymaking environment significantly affects the estimated level of policy congruence and thus conclusions about the scope of representation. These results demonstrate the importance of placing courts in the larger study of state-level representation.

The measure of legislative professionalization I developed was first published a quarter century ago. Since then, updates have appeared periodically. In this note, I briefly document the measure's usefulness in academic research and then calculate it for 2015. For reasons I detail, the updated measure is corrected for a misestimate of days in session for some states.

When the U.S. Supreme Court exercises its power of judicial review over state laws, its decisions, like the legislation it considers, frequently speak to major policy debates. Despite the Court's routine involvement with state statutes, theoretical explanations of judicial review generally do not distinguish between state laws and federal laws. The characteristics of state legislatures lead legislators in different states to have distinct perspectives and incentives, and ultimately affect the types of laws enacted in different states. We suggest that because the level of professionalism of state legislatures affects the types of laws pursued by different states, it may also affect the likelihood that a state has a law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. We find support for this expectation. Specifically, legislative professionalism is associated with an increased likelihood that a state has a law invalidated by the Court. This new evidence indicates that it is important to consider the legislative context in which state laws originate when examining the Court's review of state laws.

In 2000, Virginia became the last state in the nation to add party labels to its ballots for state-level races. This article assesses the impact of this reform on citizen participation and the partisan behavior of down-ballot voters using precinct-level election returns. It finds that after the application of labels, roll-off in contested, down-ballot races dropped by about a percentage point, a reduction of approximately 15%. Roll-off dropped more in precincts with a larger share of African Americans. Also, the association between Republican vote shares in the Lt. Governor and state legislative races and presidential vote share in the 2000 general election became stronger in the presence of party labels. This result suggests that the labels made voters behave more as national partisans in state-level contests.

Inequality in political participation is a well-known and often studied feature of American politics. An important study examining misreporting of voter turnout in opinion surveys, however, calls into question the true extent of participation inequality. Ansolabehere and Hersh's first-ever 50-state vote validation project shows that those with more political resources are more likely to misreport turnout. That is, those with higher incomes are more likely than others to report that they had voted when in fact they did not. These findings suggest that income disparities in participation are not as large as opinion surveys have led us to believe. Moreover, studies using differences between voters and nonvoters as a key political indicator may also be biased. This article presents the first assessment of whether vote misreporting creates systematic bias in measures of state participation inequality. An index of economic inequality in participation for the 50 states is developed using the Ansolabehere and Hersh validated vote data and compares the measure of political inequality with a similar measure using traditional (i.e., nonvalidated) survey data. These state indices are used to determine the extent of bias produced by misreporting and whether this bias has implications for studies using these measures of participation inequality. The latter is assessed by examining the influence of the self-reported and validated inequality measures on state welfare programs and minimum wage policy.

This article explains governors' decisions to support or oppose Medicaid expansions offered under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We theorize that governors' decisions to oppose the funding should depend on both political demands and the level of need in the state, though politics and need are often in tension. We find that governors' partisanship and the composition of the legislature have substantively meaningful effects on governors' decisions, but the level of need in the state exerts little effect on governors' decisions. This suggests that for high profile, highly politicized issues such as the Affordable Care Act, political considerations outweigh the needs of citizens and state economic conditions in gubernatorial decision making.

I offer a novel way of documenting the flow of power between the state and federal governments. Rather than look at programs or expenditures, I examine the behavior of elected officials. Assuming that ambitious politicians gravitate toward the locus of political power, I track the flow of elected officials in the American federal system. Specifically, I look at the career paths of more than 12,000 individuals who served in the U.S. Congress between 1789 and 2012. By analyzing the movement of elected officials between the state and federal levels, I confirm the prevailing story line on the evolution of American federalism while generating a measure that can be used to assess the relative distribution of power in the system across time.

To what degree do people distinguish the partisan divisions of national politics from the partisan battles within their state? We explore why people hold favorable views of the political parties in their state, investigating the degree to which such evaluations are simply an artifact of national considerations, or responsive to the political performance and ideological leanings of the state political parties. Using a national survey from 2007, we consider why people like or dislike the Democratic and Republican Parties in their states. While ratings of the state political parties carry the imprint of national political considerations, they are also responsive to the character of state parties. As the liberalism of state parties increases, liberals offer increasingly favorable evaluations of the Democratic Party, while conservatives offer increasingly negative party evaluations. Under Republican state legislatures, better economic performance translates into greater support for the party. Popular support for state political parties rests in part on the policy positions these parties take and the party's performance in office.

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.

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.