We assess the conditions under which majority status generates benefits for incumbent legislators and how these benefits are distributed among members of the majority party. We argue that majority status is valuable only in procedurally partisan chambers; that is, when the majority party monopolizes chamber leadership positions and control of the legislative agenda. Contrary to the existing literature, we also posit that these rewards should be distributed broadly across the majority party. To test our expectations, we utilize 10 recent transitions in the partisan control of U.S. state legislatures and data on campaign contributions. Consistent with our expectations, majority status is valuable, but only in procedurally partisan chambers. Furthermore, the premium in campaign contributions enjoyed by the majority party is primarily distributed to backbenchers, although top party leaders also benefit. These results provide important insights into the distribution of power and influence in U.S. state legislatures.

Critics 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.

Scholars 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.

After 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.

Scholars 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.