bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Measuring the Effect of Direct Democracy on State Policy: Not All Initiatives Are Created Equal
Authors: Bowler Shaun , Donovan Todd 
Published: January 2011

AbstractNumerous studies attempt to assess direct democracy's impact on state policy using measures of direct democracy based on dummy variables or the frequency with which initiatives appear on a state's ballots. We offer an alternative to these measures that accounts for how rules governing the initiative process vary among the states. We replicate several studies using different measures of direct democracy and demonstrate that the results of hypothesis tests can be contingent on how these institutions are measured. We contend that commonly used dummy variable measures of state direct democracy have validity problems and that hypothesis tests using such measures produce imprecise estimates of the initiative's effect on policy.
2001: A Redistricting Odyssey
Authors: McDonald Michael P. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractScholars have long been fascinated with how rearranging voters into districts affects the power of political parties, the careers of incumbents, and the representation of minorities. In this special issue, “Electoral Redistricting,” State Politics and Policy Quarterly brings together articles that touch on the three subfields of redistricting research: redistricting to advance the interests of partisans, incumbents, and racial groups. SPPQ is an excellent venue for these articles. The states are largely granted congressional redistricting authority in Article I, Section 4 of the United States Constitution, and they have the responsibility for determining their own sub-state electoral districts. And comparative state analysis provides an excellent research design to study the general impacts of political geography, redistricting institutions, and redistricting criteria.
Incumbents Out, Party In? Term Limits and Partisan Redistricting in State Legislatures
Authors: Schaffner Brian F. , Wagner Michael W. , Winburn Jonathan 
Published: January 2011

AbstractHow do term limits affect the electoral changes caused by state legislative redistricting? To answer this question, we compare the success of majority parties in the redistricting process in legislatures with and without term limits. We hypothesize that majority parties use the districts of term-limited members to redistribute supporters from safe districts to more competitive ones. We find that, indeed, the majority party changes district lines more in districts with term-limited legislators. Furthermore, the majority party is more strategic in reallocating voters for partisan gain in term-limited districts. Thus, our findings suggest that term limits make the redistricting process more partisan and that a reform intended to remove incumbents from the legislature actually strengthens the majority party.It's ironic that one of the few things that the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently upheld as a factor you can use in redrawing districts is incumbency, and we're going to be redrawing state legislative districts right after term limits take effect in the Senate. We won't have any incumbents in those districts.—Arkansas Attorney General Mark Pryor
Redistricting Local Governments in England: Rules, Procedures, and Electoral Outcomes
Authors: Rallings Colin , Thrasher Michael , Johnston Ron , Downe James 
Published: January 2011

AbstractThe Commission-based process of local government electoral redistricting in England seeks to balance the tensions between both neutral and party political and mathematic and organic approaches to boundary drawing. We evaluate the success of this process by assessing the impact of redistricting on electoral equality and the strength of the political parties in each local authority. On one hand, the Commission appears to be effective in achieving vote equality by reducing the variability between electoral units in the ratio of electors to councillors. On the other hand, the way that submissions are made to the Commission, together with aspects of social and electoral geography over which it has no influence, can allow one party to receive more electoral benefit than another from redistricting.
How Postregistration Laws Affect the Turnout of Citizens Registered to Vote
Authors: Wolfinger Raymond E. , Highton Benjamin , Mullin Megan 
Published: January 2011

AbstractA well-established scholarly tradition links lower voting costs with higher turnout. Whereas previous research emphasized the costs imposed by requiring voter registration, our research assesses postregistration costs and state policies that can make it easier for registered citizens to vote. These policies include mailing each registrant a sample ballot and information about the location of his or her polling place, providing a longer voting day, and requiring firms to give their employees time off to vote. Using the 2000 Voter Supplement to the Current Population Survey, we find that all but the last of these provisions enhance turnout, especially by the young and the less educated. Compared to a state that does none of these things, the estimated turnout of high school dropouts is nearly 11 percentage points higher in a state with these “best practices”; their effect on young registrants is nearly 10 points. Because African American and Latino registrants are disproportionately younger and less educated, they would benefit disproportionately from universal adoption of such postregistration laws. We estimate that if every state adopted these best practices, overall turnout of those registered would increase approximately three percentage points.
State Legislative Influence over Agency Rulemaking: The Utility of Ex Ante Review
Authors: Gerber Brian J. , Maestas Cherie , Dometrius Nelson C. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractScholars have argued that legislatures can use administrative procedures to constrain bureaucratic discretion and maintain policy control when delegating authority. One such mechanism is the formal authority to review agency rule proposals. We find that legislatures with stronger formal authority to review rules ex ante are viewed by agency heads as more influential in their rulemaking decisions, but this power is mitigated when such review is checked by the governor. Our analysis demonstrates the impact of institutional arrangements on general state legislative influence over policy implementation. Understanding this element of legislative control over state bureaucracies helps explain variations in state-level policymaking.The General Assembly finds that it must provide a procedure for oversight and review of regulations adopted pursuant to [the] delegation of legislative power to curtail excessive regulation and to establish a system of accountability so that the bureaucracy must justify its use of the regulatory authority before imposing hidden costs upon the economy of Pennsylvania.Regulatory Review Act of 1982Pennsylvania General Assembly
Voter Registration Requirements, Voter Turnout, and Welfare Eligibility Policy: Class Bias Matters
Authors: Avery James M. , Peffley Mark 
Published: January 2011

AbstractThe 1990s saw some of the most dramatic changes in the American social welfare system in recent decades at both the national and state levels. In particular, states were granted, and took advantage of, much wider latitude in deciding who is eligible to receive welfare benefits. To what extent did the composition of a state's electorate influence the restrictiveness of the welfare eligibility requirements it adopted at this time? We find that in states where lower-class voter turnout was comparable to that of the upper class, lawmakers were less likely to pass restrictive welfare eligibility rules. We also find that electorates in states with restrictive voter registration laws are much more likely to be biased toward upper-class turnout. Thus, lower-class voter mobilization can affect the ability of the disadvantaged to achieve policies consistent with their interests, but state voter registration laws pose a substantial barrier to such mobilization.
Legislative Organization Theory and Committee Preference Outliers in State Senates
Authors: Prince David W. , Overby L. Marvin 
Published: January 2011

AbstractRecently, several studies of Congress and the state legislatures have found evidence to support the information theory of legislative organization, that is, that legislatures develop committees whose characteristics reflect those of the parent body so as to acquire unbiased policy and political information. However, most of these studies have been conducted on the lower, larger legislative chambers. Senates, as smaller bodies that often follow the lead of legislation originating in their lower chambers, may have less need for unbiased information, perhaps allowing those bodies to develop more outlying, unrepresentative committees. We test this hypothesis in 42 state senates and find that unrepresentative committees also tend to be the exception in these upper chambers. Furthermore, as shown in previous studies of state house committees, the frequency of committee outliers in state senates appears to be idiosyncratic, with cultural, political, and institutional variables being unable to account for their observed patterns. While results support the information theory of legislative organization, evidence of outliers among party delegations on committees in these senates provides some support for the party-dominant theory.
Measuring Gubernatorial Ideology: A Content Analysis of State of the State Speeches
Authors: Coffey Daniel 
Published: January 2011

AbstractI use computer-assisted content analysis of gubernatorial state of the state addresses in 2000 and 2001 to measure state governors' ideology. These speeches provide an excellent direct measure of governors' preferences, values, and ideology. This method produced reliable and valid indicators of the ideology of state governors. The ideological content of these speeches clearly distinguishes governors on the basis of their party affiliation. Researchers should consider the content analysis of speeches and other public pronouncements as a useful way of assessing the views of governors and other public officials and incorporating them into models of state policy and politics.
Capacity, Attitudes, and Case Attributes: The Differential Success of the States before the United States Courts of Appeals
Authors: Solberg Rorie Spill , Ray Leonard 
Published: January 2011

AbstractIn the past few decades, the states have gained more discretion over policy adoption and implementation. Some of this expanded discretion has resulted from federal court rulings, as the states have increasingly used these courts to achieve their policy goals. But some states are more successful in the federal courts than others. Why is this? We examine cases argued by states in the United States Courts of Appeals between 1970 and 1996 to answer this question. Contrary to research at the Supreme Court level, we find no overall trend that the states are becoming more efficacious in court over time. We also find that the differences among the states' success in court cannot be attributed simply, or even primarily, to disparities in resources. Rather, case attributes and judicial attitudes provide the best explanations for state success in the Courts of Appeals.
Measuring State Legislative Lobbying Regulation, 1990-2003
Authors: Newmark Adam J. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractSince 1990, the American states have adopted a variety of reforms to regulate lobbying in an attempt to address a host of ethical issues. Such regulation can have important impacts on a variety of aspects of the legislative process because it typically impacts the relationships between legislators and lobbyists. How does such lobbying regulation vary across the states and over time? I have developed a measure of state lobbying regulation from 1990-2003. This measure validly captures the laws that limit relationships between lobbyists and legislators and, as such, can be used to help assess a variety of hypotheses about the legislative process.
Descriptive Representation, Legislative Leadership, and Direct Democracy: Latino Influence on English Only Laws in the States, 1984-2002
Authors: Preuhs Robert R. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractHow does minority racial and ethnic descriptive representation exert policy influence in majoritarian representative institutions? And how do nonrepresentative majoritarian institutions, such as the citizen initiative, affect the degree of this influence? I use an event history analysis of state adoption of English Only laws from 1984 to 2002 to test a model of minority policy influence that is exerted through the possession of state legislative leadership positions. Unlike previous studies, I find that the size of the minority population and the level of descriptive representation in the legislature exert only an indirect effect on legislative policy decisions. Furthermore, the majoritarian rules of the initiative undermine the policy influence minorities gain through legislative leadership and can actually lead to a policy backlash.
What Determines a Governor's Popularity?
Authors: King James D. , Cohen Jeffrey E. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractModern American state governorships have great formal policymaking authority, but, like the presidency, they also possess various informal powers to influence policymakers and policymaking. Among the most important of these informal powers is a governor's popularity with the public. Efforts to explain variation in gubernatorial popularity have yielded mixed results, in part because of limited data on governors' approval ratings and underspecified models. We assess the determinants of gubernatorial popularity that fall along both a national-state dimension and an economic-political dimension using the new U.S. Officials Job Approval Ratings dataset. Our results suggest that the proper focus of gubernatorial popularity research should be to distinguish not between its national and state influences but between its economic and political influences, as both national and state unemployment rates are central to explaining public assessments of governors in our models.
Direct Democracy and Fiscal Gridlock: Have Voter Initiatives Paralyzed the California Budget?
Authors: Matsusaka John G. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractDoes direct democracy make it impossible to balance public sector budgets? I address this question with evidence from California, where it is widely believed that voter initiatives have paralyzed the state budget process by locking in high spending while simultaneously prohibiting tax increases. A review of all initiatives approved since 1912 shows that no more than 32 percent of appropriations in the 2003-04 California state budget were locked in by initiatives and that initiatives placed only minimal constraints on the legislature's ability to raise revenue. Moreover, it is likely that the legislature would have allocated much of the money to its dedicated purpose even if it had not been required to do so by initiative. Initiatives do not appear to be a significant obstacle to balancing the state budget in California.
Punch Cards, Jim Crow, and Al Gore: Explaining Voter Trust in the Electoral System in Georgia, 2000
Authors: Bullock Charles S. , Hood M. V. , Clark Richard 
Published: January 2011

AbstractFollowing the problems with presidential voting in Florida in 2000, voters and political scientists became interested in election administration. While empirical studies have shown that different election equipment can produce different tabulation error rates, little is known about the factors that affect voters' perceptions of good election administration. Using a survey of voters in Georgia, we examine these perceptions of the voting process. We find that black voters and Democrats were significantly less confident than others that their votes were counted accurately and that they were also more likely to express concerns over the election equipment they used. In contrast, the actual voting environment, including the type of voting equipment used, appears to have no direct bearing on voters' trust in the process.
Fiscal Effects of the Voter Initiative Reconsidered: Addressing Endogeneity
Authors: Marschall Melissa J. , Ruhil Anirudh V.S. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractSeveral recent studies have investigated the relationship between direct democracy and public policy outcomes, with mixed findings. These inconsistencies may stem, in part, from researchers' failure to recognize that direct democracy institutions are distributed nonrandomly across the American states. That is, certain factors may lead a state to adopt the initiative process and influence other policy choices. We revisit the question of how the initiative influences state fiscal policy using panel data from 1960-2000 and a full-information maximum likelihood estimator that explicitly accounts for the endogeneity of the initiative. Our findings suggest that failure to endogenize the initiative in empirical analyses leads to substantially biased estimates of its effects. In particular, we find that once factors that predict whether a state has adopted the initiative are controlled, the initiative has a positive effect on state revenue generation and spending.
Institutions and Policy Representation in the States
Authors: Burden Barry C. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractCan government institutions strengthen the influence of public opinion on policymaking? While institutions often limit representation, I identify two institutional features of state lawmaking that may enhance democratic control, but in somewhat different ways. I hypothesize that one institution external to the state legislature—the ballot initiative—improves representation on specific issues, while one institution internal to the legislature—the committee discharge procedure—enhances responsiveness to mass preferences generally. This difference emerges because legislators engage in repeated interactions and logrolling across a wide range of issues while advocates of ballot initiatives do not. My analyses largely, although not entirely, support these hypotheses, with the initiative making abortion policy more responsive and committee discharge making policy generally more responsive. These results suggest a domain-specific influence of institutions that were previously thought to have similar effects on policy representation.
Policy Reversal and Changing Politics: State Governments and Dam Removals
Authors: Lowry William R. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractDoes the type of policy being considered determine the politics surrounding it? In this article, I examine how policy reversals may produce different politics than initial policy adoptions in the context of state river management policy. Traditionally, dam building was the dominant management policy, but in recent decades, efforts to restore rivers to their natural conditions through the removal of dams have become more prominent. I find that the patterns of state policymaking for policy reversals are generally similar to those that have been documented for policy adoptions, but with some important differences. Diffusion of reversals involves more states outside of active regions than is seen typically with policy adoption, and reversal diffusion occurs more gradually than adoption diffusion with many policy innovations. Finally, the most important determinants of these state policy reversals are a state's fiscal health and the presence of relevant interest groups.
Beyond Logit and Probit: Cox Duration Models of Single, Repeating, and Competing Events for State Policy Adoption
Authors: Jones Bradford S. , Branton Regina P. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractSince 1990, the standard statistical approach for studying state policy adoption has been an event history analysis using binary link models, such as logit or probit. In this article, we evaluate this logit-probit approach and consider some alternative strategies for state policy adoption research. In particular, we discuss the Cox model, which avoids the need to parameterize the baseline hazard function and, therefore, is often preferable to the logit-probit approach. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the Cox model can be modified to deal effectively with repeatable and competing events, events that the logit-probit approach cannot be used to model.
Gender, Ethnicity, and Ballot Information: Ballot Cues in Low-Information Elections
Authors: Matson Marsha , Fine Terri Susan 
Published: January 2011

AbstractIn November 1996, voters cast ballots for candidates running for 57 seats on 15 community advising and zoning boards in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Voters had little knowledge about the candidates or the boards that had been created only a few months earlier. The candidates campaigned for seven weeks. The local media generally ignored them. There were no incumbents and no party labels in the non-partisan contests. In low-information local elections such as these, voter cues and ballot design plays a decisive role in voter choice. The cues in this election were candidates' gender, ethnicity, campaign expenditures, and ballot position. Our results indicate that the most important cue was candidate gender; however, voters used ethnicity to decide whether they voted for men or women. The number of candidates on the ballot impacted vote share, while ballot position played no significant role. Those candidates who spent the most campaign money were also preferred. We argue that vote cues provide a means to address voter fatigue, where gender, ethnicity, and name recognition provide cues in this low-information, high voter fatigue situation. Our results suggest that by spending greater on their campaigns, Hispanic women—the most disadvantaged of the candidates—could run competitively against Hispanic men.
Measuring State Legislative Committee Power: Change and Chamber Differences in the 20th Century
Authors: Hamm Keith E. , Hedlund Ronald D. , Martorano Nancy 
Published: January 2011

AbstractCommittees became a vital component of the decisionmaking process in most legislative bodies around the world during the 20th century. However, very little is known about how their status evolved. In particular, the complexity of, and variation among, committee systems have made it difficult for researchers to assess fully their role in lawmaking. We present a way to measure the structural nature of committee power in state legislatures in the United States, providing data rating 33 upper and lower chambers on six dimensions of committee power based on various legislative documents for 10 legislative sessions during the 20th century. Our method of measurement and these data should help researchers to better understand the evolution of legislative committee systems.
Committee Theories and Committee Votes: Internal Committee Behavior in the California Legislature
Authors: Battista James Coleman 
Published: January 2011

AbstractPrevious tests of theories of legislative committee development have relied on floor behavior and votes, data which is one step removed from committee behavior itself. I test these prominent theories of committees by looking directly at legislative behavior in committee. I examine the patterns of committee votes in the 2000-01 sessions of the California Legislature to assess the distributive, informational, and partisan theories of committee development. I find some support for all three theories, leading me to conclude that committee behavior varies across time and issue.