Abstract In 1997, Malcolm Jewell published a review of state legislative research stating that there were great “difficulties and possibilities of doing comparative work.” Much of this difficulty lies with data and accessibility. As such, many of the foundational works in state politics, and particularly in U.S. legislatures, were rooted in single-state or small sample studies. In the 25 years since State Politics & Policy Quarterly started publication, comparative studies have become more common, allowing for better tests of “laboratories of democracy.” In this review essay, we document the extent to which state legislative studies have moved beyond single-state studies to larger comparative examinations. We outline the significant developments in the literature and highlight much of the notable research that has increased our understanding of state legislatures.
Abstract Policy diffusion has become one of the most vibrant areas of research in the study of American state politics, and State Politics & Policy Quarterly ( SPPQ ) has played a leading role in shaping that scholarship. While scholars agree that states routinely look to one another when making policy decisions, questions persist about the mechanisms that drive these processes, the methods best suited to studying them, and the implications for policymaking. This article reviews 25 years of diffusion research published in SPPQ. We classify articles into four categories – those developing theory, advancing methods, applying diffusion insights to substantive policy domains, and diffusion-adjacent studies – and analyze both their content and contributions. Our review highlights the richness of this work, the frequent overlap across categories, and the distinctive advantages of studying diffusion in state politics. We conclude by outlining opportunities for the next generation of research and reaffirming SPPQ ’s role in advancing the field.
This article traces the development of the state politics subfield within political science. Using three sources of evidence – the publication of state politics articles in the American Political Science Review , American Journal of Political Science , and Journal of Politics ; the corpus of articles in State Politics & Policy Quarterly ( SPPQ ); and the programs of the State Politics and Policy Conference (SPPC) – we examine how the field has developed over the past six decades. We argue that the founding of SPPQ and SPPC helped formalize the subfield. But, as these subfield outlets entered the scene, the proportion of state politics research in leading generalist outlets began to decline even as the number of articles remains relatively constant. Additionally, the substantive focus of the subfield has endured, anchored in topics such as elections, legislatures, and public opinion, even as areas like judicial politics and gender have gained prominence and studies of political parties have declined. Finally, we document the rise of coauthorship in state politics research, reflecting the collaborative nature of the subfield.
In July of 2024, signatures for placing an anti-gerrymandering initiative on the November ballot were certified by the Ohio Secretary of State. The proposed initiative would have replaced a bipartisan redistricting commission with a citizens' redistricting commission. Though the initiative ultimately failed, polls leading up to the general election showed Ohioans strongly supported redistricting reform. Using a survey of likely voters in Ohio, the research presented here identifies the factors that explain support for redistricting reform. While there is a strong body of research on redistricting, this research is unique because the survey data come from likely voters during an actual redistricting campaign. The findings show that identifying threats to democracy as the most important election issue, awareness of the redistricting issue, identification with the Democratic Party, and liberal ideology are all positively associated with support for redistricting reform. The findings demonstrate how voters are influenced by partisanship on salient issues and how issue awareness interacts with partisanship to determine support for redistricting. This article concludes with a discussion of the context of the ballot initiative in Ohio.
Do retrospective and prospective messages about judicial candidates influence participation in individual state high court races? To answer this question, I examine the effect of television ads for judicial candidates on ballot rolloff in state high court elections from 2000 to 2018. I find that increased exposure to ads with higher proportion of retrospective messages has diminishing returns, as more exposure to these ads increases the average rolloff per judicial election and per judicial race. Despite concerns about candidates announcing what they will do once they are elected, I find no relationship between prospective messages and voter participation given increased exposure to ads containing such messages. These results suggest that exposure to a candidate's record may both mobilize and fatigue voters, and that concerns about prospective rhetoric may be exaggerated.
Bureaucratic agencies hold enormous power to affect citizens' lives through agency rulemaking. These rules hold the force of law, though the officials writing them do not serve in elected positions. Resulting concerns about bureaucratic policymaking have given rise to prolific literature on political control by executives and legislatures seeking to limit the opportunity for moral hazard. I contend that other factors may restrain rulemaking that do not arise directly from other government institutions. Specifically, I assess whether and how state political culture checks bureaucratic power by affecting the number and content of regulatory proposals. Using a large dataset containing the nearly 200,000 proposed regulations from agencies in every US state over a 10-year period, I test the degree to which states with varying cultures utilize bureaucratic rulemaking. I then evaluate whether culture impacts the topics covered by regulation using a subset of six states representing each cultural type. Findings suggest that agencies in traditionalistic states issue fewer regulations than those in moralistic or individualistic states, but proposed rules in individualistic states cover a broader range of policy areas. These results deepen our understanding of the factors influencing regulatory politics, expanding the universe of bureaucratic control beyond government institutions to the broader environment.
State judicial elections in the United States have become increasingly expensive, raising concerns about the influence of campaign contributions on judicial impartiality. This study examines individual donations - specifically from attorneys, non-attorneys, and business donors - in state supreme court elections from 2000 to 2023. The analysis reveals that attorneys predominantly support candidates with judicial experience and Democratic affiliation, while non-attorneys and business donors favor Republican candidates and high-profile races. These patterns underscore distinct motivations among donor groups and offer insights into the evolving dynamics of judicial campaign finance.
State legislative turnover is one of the most commonly included measures in state and legislative politics. Yet, few states count legislative turnover or maintain records of internal shifts and those that do often have differences in how these records are maintained. To help resolve these differences we introduce SEAT, State Exits & Annual Turnover, a new dataset tracking legislative turnover in all 50 states spanning 30 years. In brief, we review the importance of turnover as a measure and offer insight into state legislative resources. In doing so, we illustrate the breadth of the data, demonstrate its usefulness, and offer a brief replication-extension. Focusing on annual turnover rates, we find numerous discrepancies with existing measures and state records. This release offers a more up to date understanding of turnover and its variation, as well as an inadvertent call for better records and measurements.
This review essay documents research on state courts throughout the last 25 years, tracking many of the important changes affecting state courts. Since State Politics & Policy Quarterly (SPPQ) began publication in 2001, research on state courts has evaluated a diverse range of topics, including traditionally important areas like the decisions of state judges, the effectiveness of elections for promoting accountability, public attitudes toward state courts, and judicial diversity, among other lines of study. In this essay, we describe the continued development of state courts research - noting further refinement to our understanding of state courts and the development of exciting research avenues. We first present an overview of state courts research and then discuss scholarly efforts to explain the emergence of new-style judicial campaigns, as well as the defense of judicial elections that formed within the subdiscipline. From there, we describe the current state of the state courts research and address research areas in need of attention. We note the important contributions of SPPQ to the advancement of the state courts subfield, which has published more than 50 law and courts articles since its founding. By capitalizing on the methodological and substantive advantages that come from comparative inquiry, scholars have successfully addressed many important questions and challenges involving state courts.
How does majority party security shape reciprocal bipartisan collaboration and influence legislative success? US state legislatures vary widely in the stability of majority control, offering a valuable opportunity to examine how party security conditions the incentives for cross-party collaboration. Insecure majorities may foster reciprocity as both a behavioral norm and a strategic path to legislative advancement, while long-term one-party control can diminish the returns to bipartisan engagement. I develop a theory of selective reciprocity, arguing that majority security fundamentally restructures how legislators engage in and benefit from bipartisan collaboration. Drawing on data from 401,720 bills introduced across 43 state legislatures between 2009 and 2018, I construct novel measures of bipartisan collaboration to evaluate reciprocity. I find that minority party legislators build reputational capital by consistently cosponsoring majority party bills - but their efforts yield few legislative gains in secure majority chambers. Instead, majority legislators selectively reciprocate only on minority party initiatives unlikely to pass, preserving the appearance of cooperation while protecting their policy agenda. By contrast, in insecure chambers, bipartisan cooperation is more likely to produce substantive outcomes. Reciprocity endures but is constrained - selective in form, asymmetric in effect, and structured by the institutional advantages of majority control. These findings raise broader concerns about the marginalization of minority party legislators and the limits of representation under conditions of majority security.
State supreme courts, long White and male, are increasingly diverse in recent years. As a result, a growing literature explores how various minority groups reach the bench. Interim appointments, occurring when governors in electoral states appoint someone to fill a midterm vacancy, are largely absent from this literature. This is problematic because, in states utilizing judicial elections, nearly half of all jurists initially receive an interim appointment. This subsequently conveys an incumbency advantage and may bypass women's and racial minorities' lower propensity to seek and secure office. Indeed, interim appointments are crucial to court diversification. Since appointment predictors vary by identity, we explore the path members of several groups take to the bench. We do so by drawing on a dataset of every jurist joining electoral state supreme courts from 1980 to 2023. We argue non-traditional jurists' interim appointments are conditional on the governor's political affiliation, institutional constraints, and the broader political context. We find Democrats are generally more likely to appoint non-traditional jurists, although both institutional and political factors are important moderators. Additionally, appointment predictors vary by identity group. Our findings underscore the nuanced ways state supreme courts become more diverse and the conditions under which governors appoint non-traditional jurists to the bench.
Drawing on the theory of policy diffusion, I analyze 129 regulatory firearm law provisions from 1991 to 2019 across the United States and examine the innovation and development of restrictive firearm policies. I control for the demographics, politics, and institutional characteristics of the states and hypothesize that public health concerns lead to the adoption of firearm regulations. I find support for my hypothesis: most novel, state firearm policy diffusion is dependent on state firearm suicide and homicide rates. Furthermore, I find that states are more likely to adopt policy if they are characterized by a large population, a large white population, high firearm ownership, a liberal government, or if their geographical neighbors are actively adopting firearm regulations. Firearm-related fatalities have risen dramatically, but a majority of states have adopted few policies to address this public health concern. My article highlights the state-level factors that produce a public policy response to this phenomenon.
Redistricting plays a critical role in structuring the competitive terrain of American elections and shaping the quality of democratic representation. While often viewed as a routine administrative task, the redrawing of electoral boundaries is a deeply political process that can significantly influence who runs for office, who wins, and how voters are represented. This article examines the relationship between redistricting and electoral competition, with a particular focus on how partisan gerrymandering, legal rulings, and institutional reforms have influenced the fairness and integrity of the redistricting process. Tracing its historical roots and evolution, the analysis explores how legislatures, courts, and independent commissions construct district maps and the downstream effects these configurations have on incumbent entrenchment, voter behavior, and partisan polarization. By investigating the trade-offs between fair representation and competitive elections, this article illuminates how institutional design choices shape electoral outcomes and democratic legitimacy. In doing so, it underscores the enduring significance of redistricting as a source of political contestation and reform in the ongoing struggle to strengthen American democracy.
Event history analysis (EHA) revolutionized the study of policy diffusion. However, many diffusion studies are snapshots of a policy’s spread. This begs the question of what we are learning from studies of (often) incomplete diffusion. The simple question that we ask – when should a diffusion study be conducted? – is complex to answer. We offer insight into this question using literature on EHA and empirical observation. We use data from the State Innovation and Policy Diffusion database on 83 policies that were adopted by at least 42 states to demonstrate how key results change as the observation window changes. We conclude with advice on how to approach modeling and interpreting incomplete policy diffusion in the future.
Can American state legislators use social media to influence the political behaviors and attitudes of the public by crafting strategic messages? While elected officials from every level of government use social media, it is not clear how the public responds to their individual posts. I argue that the rhetorical strategies employed by legislators can have a direct impact on their online constituencies, moderated by the existence of a copartisan relationship. I test my argument using a simulated social media environment embedded within a traditional survey experiment to mimic the impact of real-life social media posts. I find that legislators' social media posts influence their approval ratings, and at times, the public's trust in government. However, I do not find evidence that small numbers of social media posts affect a willingness to participate in politics.
American states continue to experiment with new forms of electoral institutions, including various nonpartisan election systems. One such rule, the "top-two" procedure, allows all voters to choose any candidate in the primary, advancing whichever two candidates obtain the most votes to the general election. These general elections may feature two candidates of the same party. This paper uses data from California, the largest state to adopt this rule, to examine participation and competition in the last five elections before the top-two procedure (2002 to 2010) and the first five after it (2012 to 2020), investigating the potential trade-off between the roll-off and increased competition. We find that while roll-off occurs with copartisan elections, the compensating increases in competition are substantial. Furthermore, with this system, the meaningful competition shifts toward the higher turnout general elections, which calls into question whether there is much of a participatory cost at all. Additionally, we leverage the unusual cases of write-in candidates to illustrate the electoral dynamics of these elections, highlighting the difficulty of implementing accountability with cross-party elections while demonstrating the behavioral potential of copartisan elections.
Court-curbing legislation seeks to constrain judicial independence and create a judicial environment that aligns with the preferences of the state legislature. Much of the existing court-curbing literature focuses on court curbing at the national level and state courts of last resort. However, most cases in the United States are decided by lower state courts. This article examines the motivations to curb lower state courts. Our results suggest that as legislative professionalization increases, the legislatures are more likely to introduce legislation that curbs state trial courts. Unlike existing literature on federal courts and state courts of last resort, the ideological distance from the bill sponsor and the state lower courts does not influence court-curbing activity. Our results hold when tested at both the bill and state levels.
What role does racial/ethnic diversity in the American states play in racialized partisan and partisan-ideological sorting? We expand the commonly employed empirical frame of Whites' partisan and partisan-ideological reactions to minority groups at the national level by leveraging the variation in racial/ethnic populations in the American states and accounting for both out-group and in-group size across White, Black, Latino, and Asian respondents. Using the pooled 2012-22 Congressional Election Study, the results demonstrate that Whites tend toward Republican orientations in states with larger Black and Foreign-Born populations and display stronger partisan-ideological sorting in more diverse states with large Black, Latino, or Asian populations. The analyses also reveal that partisan-ideological sorting is asymmetrical along both racial and partisan identities. White partisan-ideological sorting across state racial/ethnic contexts is driven by both Republican and Democratic identifiers, while Black, Latino, and Asian respondents show few signs of elasticity to state context in partisan identity or partisan-ideological sorting. The asymmetries in both PID and partisan-ideological alignment lead to larger racial/ethnic gaps in attachment and alignment in more diverse state contexts. These are well-understood conditions for greater partisan and factional conflict and polarized party and electoral politics.
Redistricting is often a hotly contested affair within states as the party in power attempts to maximize its chances for electoral success through injecting partisanship into the process. Previous works have evaluated how different redistricting practices can influence elections, but little is known about how redistricting can impact citizen attitudes toward government. Using an original survey with a unique experiment, we evaluate the relationship between how redistricting is performed and how satisfied citizens are with the state of democracy in the United States. We find that the mere perception of redistricting being done in a partisan manner leads to decreased levels of system support. Furthermore, our models show that independent redistricting commissions tend to reduce the perceived prevalence of gerrymandering and boost citizens' evaluations of the democratic process.
Existing scholarship investigates the influence of out-of-state donors in state-level candidate politics; however, comparatively little attention is given to out-of-state contributions in direct democracy campaigns, such as ballot initiatives and referenda. This study is the first to investigate out-of-state donations to direct democracy campaigns, focusing on the scope and characteristics of individual out-of-state donors across the United States. Utilizing an original dataset of contributions to direct democracy committees from 2006 to 2022, I present three key findings. First, out-of-state contributions to direct democracy campaigns have increased over time, with notable spikes in recent election cycles. Second, a large majority of out-of-state individual contributions total $100 or less, primarily to measures related to social issues and substance use regulation. Third, out-of-state contributions to direct democracy campaigns tend to share certain characteristics. A significant portion of these contributions comes from zip codes with lower to average incomes and states without direct democracy processes of their own. Finally, based on these characteristics, I develop a potential theory for why these donors contribute, arguing that individual out-of-state donors to direct democracy campaigns are primarily motivated by a combination of ideological and consumption-oriented considerations.
