The scholarly exchange over approaches to measuring public preferences in the American states dates back several years. This introduction to the debate attempts to provide broad perspective on how scholars have conceptualized and measured policy mood among state mass publics in the past and the implications of those choices for theoretical and empirical questions in state politics. We frame the discussion around two questions: (1) what is the concept to be measured? and (2) how does the concept fit with the research question? We conclude with some insight on the future of the debate and its implications for state politics research.

Recent studies of representation at the national and state levels have provided evidence that elected officials' votes, political parties' platforms, and enacted policy choices are more responsive to the preferences of the affluent, while those with average incomes and the poor have little or no impact on the political process. Yet, this research on the dominance of the affluent has overlooked key partisan differences in the electorate. In this era of hyperpartisanship, we argue that representation occurs through the party system, and we test whether taking this reality into account changes the story of policy dominance by the rich. We combine data on public preferences and state party positions to test for income bias in parties' representation of their own co-partisans. The results show an interesting pattern in which underrepresentation of the poor is driven by Democratic parties pushing the more liberal social policy stances of rich Democrats and Republican parties reflecting the particularly conservative economic policy preferences of rich Republicans. Thus, we have ample evidence that the wealthy, more often than not, do call the shots, but that the degree to which this disproportionate party responsiveness produces less representative policies depends on the party in power and the policy dimension being considered. We conclude by linking this pattern of influence and “coincidental representation” to familiar changes which define the transformation of the New Deal party system.

Sean M. Theriault does a great job of combining rigorous quantitative methods and data with rich anecdotal coverage of the U.S. Senate's personalities and events since the 1970s. The Gingrich Senators has a clear and provocative argument: the huge changes in the Senate in terms of ideological extremism and superpartisanship are largely attributable to the group of Republican senators who served in the U.S. House after 1978 (the year Newt Gingrich was elected to the House). These senators are distinctly more conservative than the Republican senators who did not serve in the House, and thus they are a major factor in the polarization of the Senate in the last couple of decades. They are outdone in ideological extremity only by the recently elected Tea Party Republicans. Beyond ideology, Theriault shows quite convincingly that his Gingrich senators, whom he calls “partisan warriors,” bring a new and intense flavor of partisanship to the Senate. As a group, they seem to be on a quest to make life miserable for Harry Reid and Barack Obama through procedural efforts to gum up the works in the Senate and all manner of delays of the president's appointments, even for candidates widely viewed as qualified and otherwise acceptable. I have no problem at all with empirical analyses; Theriault seems to have it right in that the Gingrich senators are distinctive and relatively cohesive, although it is not clear whether they are a self-conscious group or just fellow travelers in pursuit of a common goal.

Individual-level studies of partisan and ideological change find that individuals generally adjust their ideological preferences to match their partisan affiliation. In examining this process among the state electorates, we find that contrary to these studies, states have adjusted their partisanship to match their ideology. In addition, we use a measure of state elite ideology to show that state parties have a role in the character of the partisan sort of the states. These results are consistent with political explanations of party strategy and rational mass responses for the character of macro-political change in the states over the last half century.

Motivated by recent work suggesting that low‐income citizens are virtually ignored in the American policymaking process, this article asks whether a similar bias shapes the policy positions adopted by political parties much earlier in the policymaking process. While the normative hope is that parties serve as linkage institutions enhancing representation of those with fewer resources to organize, the resource‐dependent campaign environment in which parties operate provides incentives to appeal to citizens with the greatest resources. Using newly developed measures of state party positions, we examine whether low‐income preferences get incorporated in parties’ campaign appeals at this early stage in the policymaking process—finding little evidence that they do. This differential responsiveness was most pronounced for Democratic parties in states with greater income inequality; it was least evident for Republicans’ social policy platforms. We discuss the implications of these findings for representation in this era of growing economic inequality.

Motivated by recent work suggesting that low-income citizens are virtually ignored in the American policymaking process, this article asks whether a similar bias shapes the policy positions adopted by political parties much earlier in the policymaking process. While the normative hope is that parties serve as linkage institutions enhancing representation of those with fewer resources to organize, the resource-dependent campaign environment in which parties operate provides incentives to appeal to citizens with the greatest resources. Using newly developed measures of state party positions, we examine whether low-income preferences get incorporated in parties’ campaign appeals at this early stage in the policymaking process—finding little evidence that they do. This differential responsiveness was most pronounced for Democratic parties in states with greater income inequality; it was least evident for Republicans’ social policy platforms. We discuss the implications of these findings for representation in this era of growing economic inequality.

Redistricting received substantial attention in the popular media in 2011, as states redrew state legislative and congressional district boundaries. Many reformers continue to argue for a de-politicization of the redistricting process, claiming that partisan redistricting is responsible for declining electoral competition and increasing legislative polarization. Our analysis of evidence from state legislatures during the last decade suggests that the effects of partisan redistricting on competition and polarization are small, considerably more nuanced than reformers would suggest, and overwhelmed by other aspects of the political environment.

Americans, Congress, and Democratic Responsiveness: Public Evaluations of Congress and Electoral Consequences. By David R. Jones and Monika McDermott. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. 203p. $65.00. - Volume 9 Issue 1

Abstract This article addresses how the two reformist traditions have shaped the party systems of the states and how they can be studied. It also provides a broad outline of research on partisanship in the state electorates, state party organizations, and the role of the parties in state government. Some commentary on future directions for research is presented. It then briefly reviews these recommendations, focusing in particular on what kinds of opportunities and challenges are given for state parties research by the changes in the ideological polarization of the parties which are so evident at the national level. Stronger, responsible parties are supposed to increase both government's accountability to the public and policy coherence. The future for state parties research is bright with the promise of new data resources which will permit stronger and more definitive tests of theories of party and citizen behaviour.

In this paper we examine the conditional effect of district income on legislative responsiveness to constituency ideology in the state legislatures. This work is inspired by recent research which reports that, at the national level, elected leaders (Bartels 2008) and federal policy (Gilens 2005) are much more responsive to the policy preferences of the well-to-do, and that the poor are represented only to the extent that they happen to agree with the wealthy on specific issues. We investigate this troublesome inequality with a new data on the state legislatures. We use comprehensive sets of roll calls from the 1999-2000 and 2003-2004 legislative sessions, and partisan outcomes of the 1998, 2002 and 2008 elections to assess the responsiveness of state legislators to constituency ideology (measured by the presidential vote in the 2000 election). We find, first that responsiveness does increase with district income. However, rather than being an on-going condition, we find a pattern of lagging realignment in the lower income districts. Thus, our principal finding is less about the poorer districts being badly represented than one of increased constituency-based party polarization in the state legislatures. They will increasingly have to contend with the challenges of heightened party/ideological polarization such as those faced by the contemporary Congress.

Roll-call data have become a staple of contemporary scholarship on legislative behavior. Recent methodological innovations in the analysis of roll-call data have produced a number of important theoretical insights, such as understanding the structure of congressional decisionmaking and the role of parties and ideology in Congress. Many of the methodological innovations and theoretical questions sparked by congressional scholarship have been difficult to test at the state level because of the lack of comprehensive data on various forms of state legislative behavior, including roll-call voting. The Representation in America's Legislatures project rectifies that problem through collection of comprehensive state legislative roll-call votes across all 99 state legislative chambers for the 1999–2000 and 2003–04 legislative sessions. In this article, we describe the data available through this project as well as our data acquisition procedures, including Stata and Perl programming and OCR of paper documents, with suggestions about how to use these methods to collect a wide range of state-level data.