This article traces the development of the state politics subfield within political science. Using three sources of evidence – the publication of state politics articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics; the corpus of articles in State Politics & Policy Quarterly (SPPQ); and the programs of the State Politics and Policy Conference (SPPC) – we examine how the field has developed over the past six decades. We argue that the founding of SPPQ and SPPC helped formalize the subfield. But, as these subfield outlets entered the scene, the proportion of state politics research in leading generalist outlets began to decline even as the number of articles remains relatively constant. Additionally, the substantive focus of the subfield has endured, anchored in topics such as elections, legislatures, and public opinion, even as areas like judicial politics and gender have gained prominence and studies of political parties have declined. Finally, we document the rise of coauthorship in state politics research, reflecting the collaborative nature of the subfield.

State supreme courts, long White and male, are increasingly diverse in recent years. As a result, a growing literature explores how various minority groups reach the bench. Interim appointments, occurring when governors in electoral states appoint someone to fill a midterm vacancy, are largely absent from this literature. This is problematic because, in states utilizing judicial elections, nearly half of all jurists initially receive an interim appointment. This subsequently conveys an incumbency advantage and may bypass women’s and racial minorities’ lower propensity to seek and secure office. Indeed, interim appointments are crucial to court diversification. Since appointment predictors vary by identity, we explore the path members of several groups take to the bench. We do so by drawing on a dataset of every jurist joining electoral state supreme courts from 1980 to 2023. We argue non-traditional jurists’ interim appointments are conditional on the governor’s political affiliation, institutional constraints, and the broader political context. We find Democrats are generally more likely to appoint non-traditional jurists, although both institutional and political factors are important moderators. Additionally, appointment predictors vary by identity group. Our findings underscore the nuanced ways state supreme courts become more diverse and the conditions under which governors appoint non-traditional jurists to the bench.

How does majority party security shape reciprocal bipartisan collaboration and influence legislative success? US state legislatures vary widely in the stability of majority control, offering a valuable opportunity to examine how party security conditions the incentives for cross-party collaboration. Insecure majorities may foster reciprocity as both a behavioral norm and a strategic path to legislative advancement, while long-term one-party control can diminish the returns to bipartisan engagement. I develop a theory of selective reciprocity, arguing that majority security fundamentally restructures how legislators engage in and benefit from bipartisan collaboration. Drawing on data from 401,720 bills introduced across 43 state legislatures between 2009 and 2018, I construct novel measures of bipartisan collaboration to evaluate reciprocity. I find that minority party legislators build reputational capital by consistently cosponsoring majority party bills – but their efforts yield few legislative gains in secure majority chambers. Instead, majority legislators selectively reciprocate only on minority party initiatives unlikely to pass, preserving the appearance of cooperation while protecting their policy agenda. By contrast, in insecure chambers, bipartisan cooperation is more likely to produce substantive outcomes. Reciprocity endures but is constrained – selective in form, asymmetric in effect, and structured by the institutional advantages of majority control. These findings raise broader concerns about the marginalization of minority party legislators and the limits of representation under conditions of majority security.

Redistricting plays a critical role in structuring the competitive terrain of American elections and shaping the quality of democratic representation. While often viewed as a routine administrative task, the redrawing of electoral boundaries is a deeply political process that can significantly influence who runs for office, who wins, and how voters are represented. This article examines the relationship between redistricting and electoral competition, with a particular focus on how partisan gerrymandering, legal rulings, and institutional reforms have influenced the fairness and integrity of the redistricting process. Tracing its historical roots and evolution, the analysis explores how legislatures, courts, and independent commissions construct district maps and the downstream effects these configurations have on incumbent entrenchment, voter behavior, and partisan polarization. By investigating the trade-offs between fair representation and competitive elections, this article illuminates how institutional design choices shape electoral outcomes and democratic legitimacy. In doing so, it underscores the enduring significance of redistricting as a source of political contestation and reform in the ongoing struggle to strengthen American democracy.

Court-curbing legislation seeks to constrain judicial independence and create a judicial environment that aligns with the preferences of the state legislature. Much of the existing court-curbing literature focuses on court curbing at the national level and state courts of last resort. However, most cases in the United States are decided by lower state courts. This article examines the motivations to curb lower state courts. Our results suggest that as legislative professionalization increases, the legislatures are more likely to introduce legislation that curbs state trial courts. Unlike existing literature on federal courts and state courts of last resort, the ideological distance from the bill sponsor and the state lower courts does not influence court-curbing activity. Our results hold when tested at both the bill and state levels.

This review essay documents research on state courts throughout the last 25 years, tracking many of the important changes affecting state courts. Since State Politics & Policy Quarterly (SPPQ) began publication in 2001, research on state courts has evaluated a diverse range of topics, including traditionally important areas like the decisions of state judges, the effectiveness of elections for promoting accountability, public attitudes toward state courts, and judicial diversity, among other lines of study. In this essay, we describe the continued development of state courts research – noting further refinement to our understanding of state courts and the development of exciting research avenues. We first present an overview of state courts research and then discuss scholarly efforts to explain the emergence of new-style judicial campaigns, as well as the defense of judicial elections that formed within the subdiscipline. From there, we describe the current state of the state courts research and address research areas in need of attention. We note the important contributions of SPPQ to the advancement of the state courts subfield, which has published more than 50 law and courts articles since its founding. By capitalizing on the methodological and substantive advantages that come from comparative inquiry, scholars have successfully addressed many important questions and challenges involving state courts.

Can American state legislators use social media to influence the political behaviors and attitudes of the public by crafting strategic messages? While elected officials from every level of government use social media, it is not clear how the public responds to their individual posts. I argue that the rhetorical strategies employed by legislators can have a direct impact on their online constituencies, moderated by the existence of a copartisan relationship. I test my argument using a simulated social media environment embedded within a traditional survey experiment to mimic the impact of real-life social media posts. I find that legislators’ social media posts influence their approval ratings, and at times, the public’s trust in government. However, I do not find evidence that small numbers of social media posts affect a willingness to participate in politics.

Policy diffusion has become one of the most vibrant areas of research in the study of American state politics, and State Politics & Policy Quarterly (SPPQ) has played a leading role in shaping that scholarship. While scholars agree that states routinely look to one another when making policy decisions, questions persist about the mechanisms that drive these processes, the methods best suited to studying them, and the implications for policymaking. This article reviews 25 years of diffusion research published in SPPQ. We classify articles into four categories – those developing theory, advancing methods, applying diffusion insights to substantive policy domains, and diffusion-adjacent studies – and analyze both their content and contributions. Our review highlights the richness of this work, the frequent overlap across categories, and the distinctive advantages of studying diffusion in state politics. We conclude by outlining opportunities for the next generation of research and reaffirming SPPQ’s role in advancing the field.

Event history analysis (EHA) revolutionized the study of policy diffusion. However, many diffusion studies are snapshots of a policy’s spread. This begs the question of what we are learning from studies of (often) incomplete diffusion. The simple question that we ask – when should a diffusion study be conducted? – is complex to answer. We offer insight into this question using literature on EHA and empirical observation. We use data from the State Innovation and Policy Diffusion database on 83 policies that were adopted by at least 42 states to demonstrate how key results change as the observation window changes. We conclude with advice on how to approach modeling and interpreting incomplete policy diffusion in the future.

American states continue to experiment with new forms of electoral institutions, including various nonpartisan election systems. One such rule, the “top-two” procedure, allows all voters to choose any candidate in the primary, advancing whichever two candidates obtain the most votes to the general election. These general elections may feature two candidates of the same party. This paper uses data from California, the largest state to adopt this rule, to examine participation and competition in the last five elections before the top-two procedure (2002 to 2010) and the first five after it (2012 to 2020), investigating the potential trade-off between the roll-off and increased competition. We find that while roll-off occurs with copartisan elections, the compensating increases in competition are substantial. Furthermore, with this system, the meaningful competition shifts toward the higher turnout general elections, which calls into question whether there is much of a participatory cost at all. Additionally, we leverage the unusual cases of write-in candidates to illustrate the electoral dynamics of these elections, highlighting the difficulty of implementing accountability with cross-party elections while demonstrating the behavioral potential of copartisan elections.