The Role of State and National Institutional Evaluations in Fostering Collective Accountability Across the U.S. States

Abstract

Theories of collective accountability in American elections center on the ability, and willingness, of voters to hold legislators accountable for the job performance of the president and his party in Congress. While this work finds that legislators pay an electoral penalty for low institutional approval ratings under their party’s control, little is known whether this form of collective accountability translates to the state legislative context. We argue that collective accountability in state legislative elections follows a two-tiered approach, with state legislators being held accountable for national and state policymaking institutions. Using new state-level measures of institutional approval for national and state institutions, along with voter-level data from the 2007–2020 Cooperative Election Study, we find that presidential approval is the principal growing motivator of state legislative partisan choice with other policymaking institutions playing a minimal role, at best. These findings suggest that the electoral fortune of state legislative candidates, and state parties, are largely and increasingly determined by national forces outside of the purview of state-level policymaking institutions.