Theories of legislative policy diffusion are well formed and extensively tested, but scholars know far less about the diffusion of legal policy and reasoning. Three decades ago, Caldeira's “The Transmission of Legal Precedent: A Study of State Supreme Courts” examined this topic, but the intervening decades have been marked by considerable changes in both technology and the institutional structure of state supreme courts. We explore the effect of these changes by explaining modern translegal judicial communication in the United States. Relying on an original dataset encompassing every citation in every legal decision made by all 52 state supreme courts in 2010, we explore the effect of the proximity of two states and the prestige of the cited court on how frequently state high courts use one another's precedents. We find evidence that both proximity and prestige increase cross-state citations.

Why are some institutions quickly replaced while others endure for more than a century? Majority cycling over institutions is theoretically unavoidable, but politics provides few opportunities to study it empirically. Using data on state constitutional characteristics and legislative composition from 1834 to 2012, this article advances the theory that institutions are more likely to be endogenously replaced when the society of actors differs from the time of enactment, and that institutional characteristics can exacerbate or mitigate these risks. Results show that political change interacts with institutional particularism to preserve or undermine state constitutions. More particularistic constitutions have shorter life spans because they are more vulnerable to changes in the political environment.

In this article, we use data from the American states from 1996 to 2008 to explore the effects of immigration on income inequality. Empirical evidence from both static and dynamic models shows that the foreign-born population has a strong positive effect on state-level income inequality, even when we control for a range of federal and state political and economic contextual variables. We also find that the positive relationship between immigration and state income inequality is driven primarily by low-skill immigrants (rather than high-skill immigrants), and we provide some evidence that high-skill immigrants lower income inequality for some segments of the income distribution. We conclude that immigration—particularly low-skilled immigration—has an important effect on income inequality in the American states.

How candidates are selected, such as through nomination by party elites or election by primary voters, potentially influences the underrepresentation of women in political office. Partisan differences suggest that primary voters in right-leaning parties might select fewer female nominees than would their left-leaning counterparts even if both parties' elites are equally likely to select female nominees. This hypothesis is confirmed by an analysis of lieutenant governors in the United States, a position that varies in whether candidates are appointed by party elites or elected by primary voters. In cases where lieutenant-governor candidates are appointed, Democratic and Republican gubernatorial nominees are equally likely to choose female running mates; where primary voters select the lieutenant governor, Republicans are less likely to nominate women.

This article puts forward four strategies to improve policy diffusion research in political science: (1) use existing concepts consistently and improve their measurement, (2) clarify whether the goal is to improve the understanding of diffusion itself or to use diffusion research to explain another phenomenon, (3) pay more attention to the quality of the research design, and (4) discuss explicitly the practical implications of diffusion. Taken together, these recommendations trace a distinctive way forward for policy diffusion research.

This article examines the relationship between party competition for control of governing institutions and legislative party polarization. Although the competition/cohesion thesis dates to the 1940s, it has never before been subject to a test with data from the 50 states. Drawing upon newly available data, we take stock of the evidence. Five measures of party competition are used: (1) the number of recent shifts of party control, (2) an index of party competition for state offices, (3) the closeness of presidential elections in the state, (4) the effective number of political parties in the state, and (5) the ratio of Republicans to Democrats in the electorate. Nearly all of these measures correlate with higher levels of party polarization in both the lower and upper chambers, and none are associated with a lower level of polarization.

We examine state legislator behavior on restrictive voter identification (ID) bills from 2005 to 2013. Partisan polarization of state lawmakers on voter ID laws is well known, but we know very little with respect to other determinants driving this political division. A major shortcoming of extant research evaluating the passage of voter ID bills stems from using the state legislature as the unit of analysis. We depart from existing scholarship by using the state legislator as our unit of analysis, and we cover the entirety of the period when restrictive voter ID laws became a frequent agenda item in state legislatures. Beyond the obviously significant effect of party affiliation, we find a notable relationship between the racial composition of a member's district, region, and electoral competition and the likelihood that a state lawmaker supports a voter ID bill. Democratic lawmakers representing substantial black district populations are more opposed to restrictive voter ID laws, whereas Republican legislators with substantial black district populations are more supportive. We also find Southern lawmakers (particularly Democrats) are more opposed to restrictive voter ID legislation. In particular, we find black legislators in the South are the least supportive of restrictive voter ID bills, which is likely tied to the historical context associated with state laws restricting electoral participation. Finally, in those state legislatures where electoral competition is not intense, polarization over voter ID laws is less stark, which likely reflects the expectation that the reform will have little bearing on the outcome of state legislative contests.

As members of democratic institutions, state legislators must frequently collaborate with each other to achieve their varied goals. Given the increased attention to questions of polarization and gridlock, scholars should be particularly interested in understanding legislator decisions to collaborate across party lines. This article is primarily concerned with how institutional arrangements—specifically term limits—structure legislators' decisions to cosponsor bills with partisan opponents. Using data on bill cosponsorship from 41 states (82 chambers), we demonstrate that term limits reduce bipartisan cosponsorship even when controlling for average legislative tenure. We argue that term limits accomplish this by altering the incentives that legislators face. In addition, we demonstrate that the effect of term limits depends on the level of legislative professionalization. When professionalization is high, the negative effect of term limits on bipartisan cosponsorship is particularly pronounced.

Foundational studies in political science endeavored to explain the dynamics of voter turnout in America over time. Two theories, one focused on legal-institutional factors and the other on behavioral elements such as party mobilization strategies, were born from the need to account for temporal fluctuations in aggregate voter turnout. A comprehensive test of these competing theories has been hindered by the fact that reliable measures of the behavioral factors driving turnout have proven elusive. In this article, I develop and test an interactive theory of voter turnout that focuses on the impact of legal-institutional barriers to the franchise conditional on party organizational strength and mobilization efforts. To this end, I use data on the circulation of party-sponsored newspapers, coupled with information on the spread of voter registration requirements, to capture the effects of both behavioral and legal-institutional factors in Pennsylvania between 1876 and 1948. My results offer modest empirical support for an interactive theory of aggregate voter turnout. In isolation, however, the effects of behavioral factors are quite limited. On the contrary, legal-institutional variables exert a sizable impact on voter turnout in the state. Contrary to other recent work on the subject, careful analysis of the Pennsylvania case therefore provides a great deal of evidence in favor of legal-institutional accounts of the changes in aggregate voter turnout that were witnessed at the beginning of the twentieth century while demonstrating that behavioral factors, such as the decline of the partisan press, served to enhance the deleterious effects of legal reforms on turnout.

The Great Recession of late 2007 through 2009 had profound negative economic impacts on the U.S. states, with 49 states experiencing revenue decreases in their 2009 budgets representing more than $67.2 billion USD. Also during this period, states enacted a record number of laws related to immigrants residing in their states. We make use of data from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) to examine punitive immigration policy enactment from 2005 to 2012 and conduct a state comparative study using cross-sectional time-series analysis to examine the potential ways in which the economic recession and changing demographics in the states have impacted punitive state immigration policy making. We hypothesize that although anti-immigrant anxieties are driven in part by economic insecurity, they are also impacted by the presence of a large or growing proportion of racialized immigrants. We find that increases in state Hispanic populations and state economic stressors associated with the recession have both led to a greater number of enacted punitive state immigration policies. In addition, we find that changes in the non-Hispanic white populations in the states are also impacting the expression of anti-immigrant attitudes in state policy during this period.

Since the late 1990s, Congress and the states have debated how to treat electronic commerce for purposes of sales taxation. Frustrated by their limited progress at the national level, advocates of policy change attempted to generate vertical diffusion by using increasingly aggressive state-level actions to press Congress to act. The state initiatives provided national legislators with an “opportunity to learn,” and a systematic analysis of congressional policymaking suggests that vertical diffusion affected the early stages of the legislative process. State policies influenced the specific options that national officials considered, the rhetoric they employed, and, less consistently, bill cosponsorship patterns. The impact of vertical diffusion receded, however, as the congressional debate continued. Its muted effect during the later stages of the legislative process implies that national officials do not necessarily learn from what occurs in the “laboratories of democracy.” In addition to shedding light on the shifting politics of electronic commerce, this study illustrates the benefits both of studying the impact of vertical diffusion on individual decision-making and of conceptualizing vertical diffusion as a process rather than as an outcome to be explained.

We propose a model of public response to politicized election reform. In this model, rival partisan elites send signals on the need and consequences of a proposed reform, with partisans in public adopting those positions. We apply this to test how state use of voter identification laws corresponded with public evaluations of the conduct of a state's elections. We find that the relationship between photo identification laws and confidence in state elections was polarized and conditioned by party identification in 2014. Democrats in states with strict photo identification laws were less confident in their state's elections. Republicans in states with strict identification laws were more confident than others. Results suggest strict photo identification laws are failing to instill broad-based confidence in elections, and that the reform could correspond with diminished confidence among some.

Prior research has found that descriptive representation by race, ethnicity, or gender increases political action, but it has paid less attention to how the intersection of these identities influences participation. We extend this literature by assessing the effects on voter turnout of collective descriptive representation in U.S. state legislatures on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, and their intersections. We argue that members of historically excluded groups respond to the overall composition of their state's legislature. We test this proposition in seven elections (2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012). Our results are consistent with the minority empowerment literature, as overall collective representation does substantially increase turnout among previously excluded groups. However, the impact varies intersectionally. For white women, gender trumps race, as higher collective gender representation, regardless of race or ethnicity, increases voter turnout. For African Americans, race trumps gender, as both black men and women respond most consistently to higher levels of collective racial representation. For Latinos, we find less consistent results, but note a collective ethnic turnout effect for 2002 and 2006. We conclude that collective representation, especially at the intersection of identities, is an important factor influencing levels of turnout among previously excluded groups.

Studies of the diffusion of policies tend to focus on innovations that successfully spread across governments. Implicit in such diffusion is the abandonment of the previous policy. Yet little is known about whether governments abandon policies that have failed elsewhere, as would be consistent with states acting as policy laboratories not only for policy successes but also for failures. This article focuses on the possible abandonment of failing welfare-to-work policies in the formative years (1997–2002) of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program across the 50 U.S. states. Using a dyad-based event history analysis, I find that, if both states in a pairing have a policy and one state's policy fails (in employing welfare recipients, reducing welfare rolls, or reducing overall poverty rates), then the other state is much more likely to abandon that failing policy. Moreover, such learning from the other state's experience is more common when the states are ideologically similar to one another and when the legislature in the potentially learning state is more professional.

This article examines the impact of electoral politics on state welfare policy in the post-civil rights era South. In contrast to an emerging consensus concluding that southern African Americans materially benefited from rejoining the electorate, this study suggests that higher black registration rates actually reduced states' poverty relief efforts. In the years immediately following the Voting Rights Act (VRA), when Democrats controlled state government, the significant negative relationship between the size of the black electorate and state welfare generosity was moderated to some extent by high levels of partisan competition. In such cases, Democrats ostensibly chose a “core” targeting strategy of pursuing lower-income votes and had the institutional wherewithal to purchase these votes with policy concessions. Overall, however, the liberal “Downsian” policy response to African American mobilization was dominated by an antiredistributive response. In the South, welfare policies were relatively conservative vis-à-vis the other states during Jim Crow and became more so in response to black voting.

Leading theories of local responses to immigration claim that ideology drives policy differences. However, these studies focus exclusively on policy adoption, neglecting whether or not ideological preferences also govern the extent to which local actors choose to cooperate with federal immigration initiatives. To account for this shortcoming, I use zero-inflated negative binomial regression to assess county-level deportations resulting from local participation in the Secure Communities program. I find that existing financial and structural resources as well as financial incentives are strong determinants of county deportation levels. Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that conservative counties produce more deportations. Instead, the size of a county's policing budget moderates the relationship between ideological orientations and deportation outcomes. With federal-local policy partnerships on the rise, these findings provide an important foundation for developing a better framework to understand the implications of such partnerships for policy implementation. In short, this article suggests that although policy adoption may be a politicized process, local compliance with federal initiatives is highly dependent on the resource constraints and incentives of the actors involved.

Policy learning has been one of the primary mechanisms by which policy innovations are assumed to diffuse from one jurisdiction to another. Recent research suggests, however, that learning is more than simply observing policy adoption in other jurisdictions and must also include an assessment of the outcomes or effectiveness of those policies. This article argues that an assessment of the ability to implement an innovation is also likely to be a component of the learning process. Specifically, it argues that potential adopters are likely to ask not only, “Was the policy effective in other states that adopted it?” but also, “Can we make the policy work for us?” We test hypotheses drawn from this general argument in a directed dyad analysis of renewable portfolio standards in the American states between 1997 and 2009. Results indicate that shared implementation environments among jurisdictions help determine the impact that information about policy effectiveness has on adoption decisions. These findings suggest that implementation concerns may be an important part of the policy learning process.