Institutional Design and Policy Responsiveness in US States

Abstract

There is significant disagreement on the moderating role of institutions on policy responsive- ness, yet overwhelmingly research in state politics has focused on single institutions. This project leverages a new aggregate scale of state institutions to evaluate if the collective insti- tutional context moderates the influence of public opinion on policy. I use a recently released latent scale of institutional context and find that high levels of accountability pressure strongly strengthen public opinion’s influence on policy for both economic and social policy, while the strength of a state’s checks and balance system is largely unrelated to policy responsiveness. These results demonstrate the importance of incorporating aggregate institutional design into our understanding of the role of institutions in state politics, and that collectively institutions play a large role in determining how public opinion is translated into policy.