Elected politicians can manage government agencies using administrative procedures that either enhance agencies' political responsiveness or their autonomy. Rational politicians will delegate autonomy when the benefits of agency decision-making are high, such as when the policy problem is technically complex. This article tests this hypothesis by investigating how state politicians design the institutional features of state clean air agencies and how these agencies perform under different administrative procedure regimes. I find that when a state's air pollution problem is complex, politicians eschew administrative procedures that enhance political control, and these agencies respond by choosing policies from a broader range of options.

When social movement activists achieve an institutional position at the policymaking table, does their political behavior moderate with the norms of that institution? We explore this question by examining the behavior and attitudes of Christian Right activists appointed to serve on the 1997-98 Florida Constitutional Revision Commission (CRC). This commission was marked by an unusually high degree of conflict between three factions—Democrats, business-oriented Republicans, and socially conservative Republicans associated with the Christian Right. We found that by maintaining an outsider, purist political style, the commissioners with Christian Right ties were ineffective, isolated, and estranged from the mainstream Republicans on the CRC. The former remained true to their outsider status, behaving more like purist social movement activists than public officials with professional orientations. While these Christian Right elites adapted outwardly to some institutional norms for strategic purposes, they did not assimilate wholly to the demands of conventional political interchange.

Political scientists, historians, pundits, and campaign managers have often sought to understand electoral politics by examining intrastate political geography. But what practical or theoretical contribution can political geography make when we have the powerful tool of survey research? We use a geographic statistic to identify regional nodes in four states, for the 1928–36 and 1988–2000 presidential elections. By weighting county-level election returns for their contribution to the total statewide vote for each party, we find that traditional regional characterizations of these states' politics are altered dramatically. We find that the parties typically compete on the same turf, making clear sectional distinctions harder to draw. Furthermore, over time within three of these four states, the Democratic vote has become more geographically concentrated, while the Republican vote has become more geographically dispersed. These findings have implications for the organization of statewide governing coalitions, the cost of party mobilization efforts, and the study of candidate emergence and success.

Job approval ratings for state governors, unlike those for the United States president, have been relatively inaccessible to political scientists. We introduce the U.S. Officials Job Approval Ratings (JAR) dataset, a new compilation of gubernatorial job approval ratings—along with senatorial and state-level presidential ratings—that draws together many of these ratings, beginning with the first published rating in 1947 and extending through 2000. We describe some of the characteristics of these data, especially the kinds of rating scales used and their impact on overall approval assessment. We then show that 1993–2000 presidential approval levels varied widely from state to state and are correlated with state-level support for Clinton in the 1996 presidential election. Finally, we note that while gubernatorial approval often declines over time, many governors remain popular over the length of their term.

I use elements of overhead democracy and policy implementation theory to explain hate crime law enforcement in American cities. I develop hypotheses of the relationships between law enforcement, state and local policies, and the preferences of elected officials, bureaucrats, and the public. Using survey and demographic data, I find that local hate crime law enforcement is driven by the presence of state hate crime policies, the support and efforts of bureaucrats, the tractability of the hate crime problem, police funding and training, and public preferences. Law enforcement does not appear to be significantly influenced by the preferences of elected officials, local hate crime policies, or administrative procedures for hate crime cases. Thus, although political control by local elected officials is weak, state officials and citizens have some influence over local hate crime law enforcement.

Do state legislators use media tactics in policy-making? If so, which legislators, how often, and to what ends? Despite a number of recent studies asserting the importance of the media in American politics, we still have not answered these basic questions. Using a survey of state legislators from California, Georgia, and Iowa, I find that state legislators frequently use media tactics in policy-making, although they still prefer traditional forms of legislating. While the bulk of their media tactics is aimed at constituents, state legislators also target policy elites. This suggests that state legislators use the media for more than just aiding in their re-election. Finally, my analyses suggest that the frequency with which legislators use media tactics is largely a function of the resources at their disposal.

We explore the effect of the transparency of fiscal institutions in government on the scale of government and gubernatorial approval using a formal model of accountability. We construct an index of fiscal transparency for the American states from detailed budgetary information. With cross-sectional data for 1986-95, we find that—on average and controlling for other factors—fiscal transparency increases both the scale of government and gubernatorial approval. Our results imply that more transparent fiscal institutions induce greater effort by politicians, to whom voters give higher job approval, on average. Voters also respond by entrusting greater resources to politicians where fiscal institutions are more transparent, leading to larger government.

Can a school curriculum influence the political socialization of students? And if so, can such socialization “trickle up” to influence the political socialization of these students' parents? We examine the effects of Kids Voting USA in Kansas to answer these questions. By the 1996 presidential election, Kids Voting was implemented in several Kansas counties. Consequently, we are able to compare turnout—and change in turnout across different elections—in such counties with those that did not adopt the program. After controlling for a variety of county-level characteristics that are likely to affect turnout, regression analyses indicate a positive and significant contribution of Kids Voting to county turnout, and change in turnout across elections. We address the practical implications of this study and emphasize its theoretical contribution to theories of political socialization.

This study assesses the effects of changing electoral structure on the representation of women in American state legislatures. Specifically, how does converting from multimember districts (MMDs) to single-member districts (SMDs) affect the proportion of women serving in the state legislature? I use a quasi-experimental design, comparing election results from the four states that eliminated MMDs during the reapportionment following the 1990 census to those in eight states whose systems did not change during this period. The weight of the evidence suggests that abandoning MMDs for SMDs decreases the representation of women in state legislatures.

Retail sales on the Internet are growing at a rapid pace. Some states have tapped into this potential revenue source with Internet sales taxes, while others have not. What are the factors that lead states to make these policy decisions? Using a 50-state comparative research design, we find that interest groups, as much as the partisan and economic factors emphasized in previous research on state tax policy, are correlated with adoptions of these state tax innovations. Furthermore, this interest group influence is not limited to a single industry, but comes from self-interested groups representing both sides of the issue, including newly emerging technology interests.

Is public policy in states that allow initiatives and referenda more responsive to public opinion than in states that do not? Political science theory provides conflicting answers to this question. On one hand, these direct democracy mechanisms give citizens a direct voice in public policy, which may directly and indirectly shape policy to their wishes. On the other hand, formal theories of collective choice call into question the ability of direct democracy to produce policy that reflects the underlying distribution of mass preferences. This study tests these competing hypotheses by assessing the impact of public opinion on abortion policy using a new survey-based measure of state-level abortion attitudes (Brace et al. 2002). The empirical findings indicate that states with initiatives and referenda are more responsive to public opinion on abortion policy.

The connection between the government and the governed is often evaluated using election results. This article explores this connection between elections using data on gubernatorial approval in the states. Specifically, I ask the question, Do governors with greater job approval ratings have greater influence over the state bureaucracy than governors with lower approval ratings? Measures of both gubernatorial influence and administrator contact with gubernatorial staff are regressed on gubernatorial approval ratings from state polling data, along with controls for other state characteristics. The results show that approval does affect a governor's influence with the bureaucracy, and as such, serves as an additional connection between the government and the governed.

How well are the state- and national-level literatures on interest representation connected? We identify landmark studies at both levels and conclude that there is little cross-fertilization between them. Rather, the landmark state studies are more descriptive, and focus on a trade-off between group and party power, reflecting the legacy of Belle Zeller, while the national-level studies are embedded in theories used in the broader discipline and, therefore, focus on different processes. One consequence of this is that the national literature does not cite state-level studies very often. We conclude with recommendations for enhancing the impact and theoretical contribution of the state literature on interest organizations and the politics of interest representation.

Public approval is an important tool for chief executives. It helps predict their re-election success and it may translate into greater legislative and administrative policy success. Does a governor's personality influence his or her public approval? We address this question by examining the effects of three gubernatorial motives—affiliation-intimacy, achievement, and power—on public approval. We hypothesize that governors who are especially motivated by affiliation-intimacy will be more successful with the public. However, we find that governors motivated by a desire for power have greater public approval, while the affiliation-intimacy motive is unrelated to approval. Furthermore, the achievement motive is negatively related to approval in our data. We contrast these results with our earlier findings that a combination of power and achievement motives leads to gubernatorial success in the legislative arena. It appears that personality is important in determining gubernatorial success with both the public and the legislature, but in decidedly different ways.

Over the last 10 years, a great deal of research has been conducted in what had been a neglected field—state legislative campaign finance. Much of this research is motivated by concerns about the impact of money on democracy in state legislative elections. This essay reviews that work critically, looking particularly at studies of spending levels, campaign contributions and fundraising, spending and voting, and campaign finance reform. Comparing campaign finance systems across the states facilitates theory building, provides empirical leverage with which to test hypotheses developed at the congressional level, and allows us to test the efficacy of campaign finance reforms.

Can minority representation influence policy outputs when decisions are largely governed by formal and informal rules? This article addresses this question using detailed data on school district representation and budgetary allotments in Texas, assessing the link between Hispanic school board representation and budgetary support for bilingual education. My findings suggest that descriptive representation does affect the budgetary process. My analyses also suggest that modeling representation as a role rather than as an input provides greater insight into the representational process.

Research on the public approval of American governors has focused almost exclusively on the impact of economic conditions on fluctuations in such approval. This article adds events variables to a model of gubernatorial public approval including the more commonly used economic variables, and tests this model in a time-series analysis in three states. The results suggest that the effect of political events is minimal and mixed. Furthermore, the analysis does not clearly support any general theory of gubernatorial approval. Instead, the factors that influence public support for governors seem to vary across time and state.

This article examines candidates' perceptions of political party services provided in state legislative campaigns using survey data from seven states in 1994. I find that candidates generally do not feel that party assistance is very helpful, although multivariate analyses show that this varies systematically with state context and district-level competition. The influence of campaign financing on candidate perceptions is particularly important. In districts where candidates spend similar amounts on their campaigns, candidates believe parties provide greater assistance. My findings suggest that parties target campaign services to candidates in the same way that they target financial contributions, focusing on districts where these resources are most likely to affect the election outcome.

Despite the bias against such studies in our discipline, we argue that research designs focusing on a single state are sometimes preferable to those employing data from all 50 states. Single state studies are appropriate when the researcher wishes to generalize to a unit of analysis other than the states themselves, when conditions in a given state provide a unique opportunity for the most rigorous test of a hypothesis, and when the measurement advantages of a single-state study outweigh the costs of limited generalization. We draw on a range of literature to reinforce our primary contention, that it is soundness of theory and rigor of analysis, rather than the number of states, that makes research valid and important.

Aggregate voter turnout rates in the United States have been used in many political science studies, as both a dependent and an independent variable. Most of these studies use the voting-age population as the denominator in their turnout rate measure. However, the voting-age population is not the same as the population of eligible voters. I demonstrate why this distinction matters and outline the steps to construct the voting-eligible population for each of the states from 1980–2000 to provide more accurate measures of state-level voter turnout rates.