bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
U.S. State and Local Public Policies in 2006: A New Database
Authors: Sorens Jason , Muedini Fait , Ruger William P. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractThis article introduces a new, public database of U.S. state and local public policies, now available at www.statepolicyindex.com. The database covers more than 170 different state or local policies, coded at the state level as of December 31, 2006, in most cases. We use principal components analysis and derive two orthogonal measures of state policy ideology, which we label policy liberalism and policy urbanism. Our policy liberalism measure passes several reliability and validity checks, while policy urbanism is strongly predicted by urbanization rate, percentage of African Americans in the population, and percentage of Christian adherents in the population.
The Initiative Process and the Dynamics of State Interest Group Populations
Authors: Boehmke Frederick J. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractWhat effect does the initiative process have on the volatility of interest group populations? Theoretical results suggest that interest group communities in initiative states should be characterized by greater rates of entry and exit since the presence of the initiative process increases mobilizations by potentially less stable groups, particularly broad-based citizen groups. I test this prediction using data on state interest group lobby registrations in 1990 and 1997. Tabular and regression analysis of exit and entry rates for all groups as well as separate analyses for different kinds of groups, including citizen, economic, membership, institutions, and associations, are consistent with the prediction, with the effect strongest and most consistent for citizen and membership groups.
Party, Performance, and Strategic Politicians: The Dynamics of Elections for Senator and Governor in 2006
Authors: Brown Adam R. , Jacobson Gary C. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractIn this article, we analyze a unique set of state-level monthly survey data covering the eighteen months preceding the 2006 election to estimate (1) the relative effects of national and local conditions on the strength of challenges to incumbent senators and governors and (2) the effects of these challenges on incumbent popularity and, ultimately, vote shares. The analysis confirms several of the basic components of the theory that the strategic behavior of candidates and campaign contributors amplifies the effects of local and national conditions on election results, thereby enhancing electoral accountability. But it also uncovers a striking difference between the two offices. Even taking the strongly pro-Democratic national climate into account, the election context had a strong tendency to reduce the approval ratings of Senators, while it had an equally strong tendency to increase the approval ratings of governors. We speculate as to what might account for this difference.
Local Politics and International Agreement: The Case of Government Procurement in the U.S. States
Authors: Kim Dong-Hun 
Published: January 2011

AbstractThis article examines the responses of sub-national governments to international agreements that severely reduce their policy discretion. I focus on their decision to subject public procurement to international competition by joining the Agreement of Government Procurement (GPA) of the World Trade Organization. In a public procurement market, a government becomes both a market participant and a market regulator. I argue that the propensity of governments to join the GPA, thus reducing their discretion as market regulators, depends on the degree of local political competition. Studying state governments in the United States, I find that the degree of political competition positively affects not only the propensity to join the GPA but also the amount of procurement that a government subjects to international competition.
Do Redistricting Principles and Practices Affect U.S. State Legislative Electoral Competition?
Authors: Forgette Richard , Garner Andrew , Winkle John 
Published: January 2011

AbstractCritics of U.S. congressional and state legislative redistricting have argued that gerrymandering severely undermines electoral competitiveness to the point of violating constitutional equal protection standards. In this article, we evaluate whether redistricting principles and processes have any measurable consequence on state legislative electoral competition. In addition to their substantive importance, state legislative general election contests provide greater variance than congressional data for empirically assessing theoretical propositions regarding redistricting principles and processes. We find that electoral competitiveness in state legislative races declined throughout the 1990s, even after term limit reforms were implemented. The proportion of uncontested state legislative seats has doubled since the 1970s, and there has also been a slight increase in average margin of election district victory. Our results show that political principles and some traditional, “politically-neutral” redistricting principles significantly decrease the probability of uncontested state legislative elections. In contrast, independent redistricting commissions did not appear to affect state legislative competition. We conclude with a discussion of how our findings relate to the redistricting reform debate.
Testing the Impact of Racial Attitudes and Racial Diversity on Prisoner Reentry Policies in the U.S. States
Authors: Percival Garrick L. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractScholars have done an admirable job explaining the political forces behind the build up in punitive crime policies over the past three decades. This research investigates whether one of these factors—the politics of race—structures the extent to which crime prevention-centered policies are incorporated into states' correctional systems. Using the General Social Survey to create reliable aggregate measures of racial attitudes across the states, I question the extent to which racial attitudes and racial context impact states' propensity to incorporate “softer” prisoner rehabilitation services into their correctional systems. Results show that whites' attitudes toward African Americans and the size of a state's minority population influenced the percentage of prisoners in each state that receive access to education and mental health services in 1995 and 2000. In states with greater racial diversity and states in which whites are less tolerant toward African Americans, state prisoners are less likely to receive rehabilitation services.
Term Limits as a Boon to Legislative Scholarship: A Review
Authors: Mooney Christopher Z. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractAfter an exceptionally swift reform movement in the 1990s, 15 states are now adjusting to the most significant institutional change to their governments in a generation—legislative term limits. Beyond the basic task of identifying and cataloguing their various substantive impacts, term limits have presented scholars with an exceptional opportunity to test legislative theory for two reasons. First, most legislative theory is based on behavioral assumptions that term limits appear to affect systematically, such as the reelection motivation. Second, the distribution of term limits across the states gives scholars exceptional methodological advantages for testing theory. In this article, I review the scholarly literature on the impacts of state legislative term limits, describe their theoretically relevant implications and methodological advantages, and advocate using the reform to develop an important research agenda.
Approaches to Modeling the Adoption and Diffusion of Policies with Multiple Components
Authors: Boehmke Frederick J. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractScholars have begun to move beyond the dichotomous dependent variable—indicating whether a state adopts a policy or not in a given year—usually employed in event history analysis. In particular, they have devoted increasing attention to the components of policies that states adopt. I discuss a variety of estimators that have been employed to analyze the adoption and modification of policies with multiple components, including various forms of event history analysis, OLS, and event count models. With various modifications, the researcher can estimate models that treat each component as distinct, pool these models to leverage commonalities across components, or treat the components as identical parts of the same process. Each of these has its strengths and may be appropriate in certain circumstances. Nonetheless, in the majority of cases, some version of event history analysis for multiple or repeat failures is likely to be preferred. The different approaches are illustrated by studying state adoption of various obesity-related policies.
Scandals, Lawsuits, and Politics: Child Welfare Policy in the U.S. States
Authors: Gainsborough Juliet F. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractIn order to understand what factors drive child welfare policymaking, this research analyzes data on spending and legislation from the U.S. states over a three-year period. The key independent variables are scandal, litigation, federal oversight, and local discretion. While states that experience a scandal or a lawsuit do not increase their spending levels over previous years, they do enact more child welfare legislation. This raises the possibility that states engage in symbolic rather than substantive responses to child welfare crises. The administrative structure of the child welfare system also affects state policymaking.
Impartial Judges? Race, Institutional Context, and U.S. State Supreme Courts
Authors: Bonneau Chris W. , Rice Heather Marie 
Published: January 2011

AbstractWe address a fundamental question in judicial politics: other factors being equal, do African-American judges behave differently than white judges? Many presume that white judges differ from their minority counterparts in terms of sentencing, deliberation, and propensity to overturn decisions. However, to date, little empirical evidence exists to suggest systematic differences in behavior between these judges. Here, we utilize the newly created judge-level U.S. State Supreme Court Database to assess whether judicial decisionmaking is affected by the race of the judge. Looking at all criminal cases decided by U.S. state supreme court judges from 1995 to 1998, we find evidence of differences between white and non-white judges, but only in states lacking an intermediate appellate court. This finding suggests the effects of race on judicial decisionmaking are conditioned by the institutional structure of the court system.
Political Insulation and Legislative Interventions: The Impact of Rule Review
Authors: Poggione Sarah J. , Reenock Christopher 
Published: January 2011

AbstractWhile previous work suggests that enacting coalitions' use ofex antecontrol devices shapes future legislatures' incentives to intervene in the bureaucracy, it is less clear how such insulation motivates individual legislators. We advance an individual-level account of how legislative rule review, a control device that structures an agency's insulation from political interference, differentially shapes legislators' preferences for direct and statutory intervention tactics. Using an original survey of U.S. state legislators, we find that insulation reduces the expected policy benefits of direct interventions, making these tactics less attractive to legislators. Moreover, to capitalize on more permeable agency design, legislators must have access to key resources. For statutory tactics, insulation has no effect on legislators' intervention preferences. Our findings suggest that insulation is a durable control device that casts a long shadow in protecting an enacting coalition's interest in agency affairs.
Can the College Vote Turn Out?: Evidence from the U.S. States, 2000–08
Authors: Richman Jesse , Pate Andrew 
Published: January 2011

AbstractCollege students in the U.S. have long faced barriers to college town registration and voting. Arguably, these barriers raise the costs associated with electoral participation for students living away from home. Despite ongoing debate about where students should vote, the extent to which college town restrictions limit participation by students has never been estimated. This article is the first to demonstrate that college town registration barriers implemented by the U.S. states reduce participation in national elections.
Latino Representation and Education: Pathways to Latino Student Performance
Authors: Ross Ashley D. , Rouse Stella M. , Bratton Kathleen A. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractThe rapid growth of the Latino population in the U.S. over the past 15 years has led to a significant increase in levels of primary and secondary school enrollment rates of Latino children. Research on Latino education has demonstrated the institutional and contextual challenges faced by this increasingly significant group, but studies that link Latino representation and Latino educational performance have neglected to sort out the direct and indirect effects of representation on student achievement. The central assumption in these studies outlines a causal chain running from Latino political representation (school boards), to Latino bureaucratic representation (administrators and teachers), to Latino student performance. This study tests these theoretical assumptions by employing a path analytic model using data from 1,040 Texas school districts for the years 1997–2001 to tease out the direct and indirect effects of Latino representation on Latino student achievement. We find robust evidence of the impact of Latino political representation on Latino educational attainment in Texas, operating via a direct effect on the number of Latino administrators and teachers and an indirect effect on Latino student performance. Additionally, our results demonstrate that descriptive representation becomes substantive representation in the area of education policy for Latinos and that this relationship remains strong over time. These findings underscore the importance of school board elections and school district hiring practices on Latino student performance.
Measuring Governors' Political Orientations Using Words as Data
Authors: Weinberg Micah 
Published: January 2011

AbstractThis article introduces a parsimonious measure of the expressed political orientation of U.S. state governors that compares word choices in their “State of the State” speeches to the language of state and national party platforms. The technique used to generate this measure is Wordscores, a method that relies on the use of reference texts to generate a set of ideal points for gubernatorial rhetoric. I discuss the conventions and substantive content of governors' speeches and the choice of party platforms as reference texts before presenting the average “partisan signal” in speeches by 97 governors in all 50 states between 2000 and 2006.
Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the U.S. States: A Re-appraisal
Authors: Berry William D. , Fording Richard C. , Ringquist Evan J. , Hanson Russell L. , Klarner Carl E. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractBerry et al.'s (1998) measures of U.S. state citizen and government ideology rely on unadjusted interest-group ratings for a state's members of Congress to infer information about (1) the ideological orientation of the electorates that selected them or (2) state legislators and the governor from the same state. Potential weaknesses in unadjusted interest-group ratings prompt the question: Are the Berry et al. measures flawed, and if so, can they be fixed by substituting alternative measures of a member's ideology? We conclude that a version of the Berry et al. state government ideology indicator relying on NOMINATE common space scores is marginally superior to the extant version. In contrast, we reaffirm the validity of the original state citizen ideology indicator and find that versions based on NOMINATE common space scores and adjusted ADA and COPE scores introduced by Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder (1999) are weaker.
Does Measurement Matter? The Case of VAP and VEP in Models of Voter Turnout in the United States
Authors: Holbrook Thomas , Heidbreder Brianne 
Published: January 2011

AbstractThe introduction of McDonald and Popkin's (2001) measure of the voting eligible turnout rate represents an important advancement in the literature on voter turnout in the United States, most of which was based on studies of turnout among the voting age population. Among other things, their measure called into question many of the findings of research on the decline in turnout during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In this article, we investigate how the measurement of voter turnout affects the interpretation of the sources of turnout in the states. Focusing on voting-age and voting-eligible turnout in presidential elections from 1980 to 2004 as separate dependent variables, we estimate models of state-level turnout and compare the results for each of the measures. Our findings suggest that measurement does matter in state-level voter turnout models and that some inferences drawn from studies of turnout among the voting age population are not sustained when substituting voting eligible turnout.
Randomization Tests and Multi-Level Data in U.S. State Politics
Authors: Erikson Robert S. , Pinto Pablo M. , Rader Kelly T. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractMany hypotheses in U.S. state politics research are multi-level, positing that state-level variables affect individual-level behavior. Unadjusted standard errors for state-level variables are too small, leading to overconfidence and possible false rejection of null hypotheses. Primo, Jacobsmeier, and Milyo (2007) explore this problem in their reanalysis of Wolfinger, Highton, and Mullin's (2005) data on the effects of post-registration laws on voter turnout. Primo et al. advocate the use of clustered standard errors to solve the overconfidence problem, but we offer an alternative solution: randomization tests. Randomization tests are non-parametric tests that do not rely on comparisons to theoretical test statistic distributions. Instead, they use distributions tailored to the data, created by randomly scrambling the data many times to simulate what would be observed under the null hypothesis. Unlike with clustering, with the randomization test, U.S. state-level reforms generally fail to be significant both as additive effects and as interactions with individual characteristics.
Measuring “Term Limitedness” in U.S. Multi-State Research
Authors: Sarbaugh-Thompson Marjorie 
Published: January 2011

AbstractBy measuring U.S. term limits dichotomously, investigators ignore the vast differences among laws limiting state legislative service. Furthermore, this measurement problem increases the risk of false negatives and confounds the effects of term limits with those of the citizen initiative. To address this, I propose two sets of continuous measures of term-limitedness. The first set compares mandated turnover after term limits to turnover in the 1980s, the decade before term limits began sweeping elected officials from office. A second set adjusts the first set to reflect the potential for legislators to cycle repeatedly between legislative chambers when only their consecutive years of service are limited. These continuous measures outperformed a dichotomous designation of term limits in two tests, suggesting that the proposed measures can reduce the risk of false negatives about term limits in U.S. multi-state research and that they are more robust in the face of confounding effects from the citizen initiative.
The Power of Brand: Beyond Interest Group Influence in U.S. State Abortion Politics
Authors: Calfano Brian Robert 
Published: January 2011

AbstractIn this article, I examine whether a constituency's political brand—defined here as the reputation that white evangelicals and Catholics have for “pro-life” abortion policy—influences the public abortion position taken by members in six U.S. state Houses of Representatives. At issue is whether constituent political brand functions as a non-interest group influence on state legislators. A fitting of the brand literature to the state politics domain suggests that the effect of political brand might be dependent on constituent presence in a state House district—be it the relative size of the constituency or its organizational (church-based) cohesion. Results confirm the influence of constituent political brand and point to white evangelicals as having an influence on a member's abortion position based on the size and homogeneity of their constituency. Catholics possess brand influence as well, but theirs is powered by the church's organizational—parish—presence and cohesion in U.S. state House districts. These findings suggest that the two major “pro-life” constituencies in American politics are able to leverage brand in the political realm in ways that the literature has not previously considered.
Diffusion of Environmental Concerns in Congregations across U.S. States
Authors: Djupe Paul A. , Olson Laura R. 
Published: January 2011

AbstractMost American congregations belong to denominations. These national networks often promote relevant political issues that constituent congregations may choose to address. Therefore, religious organizations might play a significant role in promoting the process of policy diffusion in the U.S. states. At the same time, congregations are tradition-maintaining institutions that focus first on their own immediate concerns, promoting the maintenance of distinctive regional political contexts and reinforcing the variation of federalism. In this article, we assess the role that religious organizations play in American federal democracy, promoting diffusion or the status quo, with respect to one crucial issue on which religious groups have been particularly vocal: the environment and global warming. We employ two datasets (a large-N national survey and two in-depth survey case studies of clergy in Ohio and South Carolina) and find evidence that religious organizations are vast communication networks thatcanpromote policy diffusion, but typically do not.
The Impact of High-Visibility Contests for U.S. State Court Judgeships: Partisan Voting in Nonpartisan Elections
Authors: Rock Emily , Baum Lawrence 
Published: January 2011

AbstractOver the past two decades, campaigns for judicial elections in the U.S. states have become larger in scale. We analyze the impact of this development on voters' choices between candidates. Using a series of post-election surveys of voters in fourteen contests for the Ohio Supreme Court over twenty years, we probe the relationship between the amount of media coverage and campaign spending in a contest and the level of partisan voting. We find that in a state in which candidates' party affiliations are not listed on the ballot, high-visibility contests for judgeships produce more partisan voting than do lower-visibility contests. That effect was more pronounced for voters with greater political knowledge. These findings indicate that, at least in one state setting, high-visibility judicial contests have the effect of making more voters aware of basic information about the candidates, and that information informs their voting choices.