Abstract We examine how institutional selection procedures affect the ideology of state supreme court chief justices. We argue that institutional selection methods empower those charged with choosing chief justices to select court leaders who reflect their own preferences, and we test this theory using data from all 50 American states from 1970 to 2017. Our results show that states that use popular elections to select chief justices tend to produce court leaders whose preferences reflect the electorate, and states that use commission-assisted elite appointment tend to produce chief justices whose preferences mirror those of political elites. While we find that peer election systems produce leaders with preferences similar to median court preferences, court preferences are also associated with other methods of chief justice selection.
{"title":"Chief Justice Selection Rules and Judicial Ideology","authors":"Teena Wilhelm, Richard L. Vining, David A. Hughes","doi":"10.1017/spq.2023.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2023.8","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We examine how institutional selection procedures affect the ideology of state supreme court chief justices. We argue that institutional selection methods empower those charged with choosing chief justices to select court leaders who reflect their own preferences, and we test this theory using data from all 50 American states from 1970 to 2017. Our results show that states that use popular elections to select chief justices tend to produce court leaders whose preferences reflect the electorate, and states that use commission-assisted elite appointment tend to produce chief justices whose preferences mirror those of political elites. While we find that peer election systems produce leaders with preferences similar to median court preferences, court preferences are also associated with other methods of chief justice selection.","PeriodicalId":47181,"journal":{"name":"State Politics & Policy Quarterly","volume":"23 1","pages":"267 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42876856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Emily U. Schilling, Abigail V. Matthews, Rebecca J. Kreitzer
Abstract Legislators must decide when, if ever, to cosponsor legislation. Scholars have shown legislators strategically time their positions on salient issues of national importance, but we know little about the timing of position-taking for routine bills or what this activity looks like in state legislatures. We argue that legislators’ cosponsorship decision-making depends on the type of legislation and the partisan dynamics among the current cosponsors. Members treat everyday legislation as generalized position-taking motivated by reelection, yet for key legislation, legislators are policy-oriented. With a new dataset of over 73,000 bills introduced in both chambers of the Texas state legislature in the 75th to 86th regular sessions (1997–2020), we use pooled Cox proportional hazard models to evaluate the dynamics of when legislators legislate, comparing all bills introduced with a subset of key bills. The results show that legislators time their cosponsorship activity in response to electoral vulnerability, partisanship, and the dynamics of the chamber in which they serve.
{"title":"Timing Their Positions: Cosponsorship in the State Legislature","authors":"Emily U. Schilling, Abigail V. Matthews, Rebecca J. Kreitzer","doi":"10.1017/spq.2023.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2023.7","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Legislators must decide when, if ever, to cosponsor legislation. Scholars have shown legislators strategically time their positions on salient issues of national importance, but we know little about the timing of position-taking for routine bills or what this activity looks like in state legislatures. We argue that legislators’ cosponsorship decision-making depends on the type of legislation and the partisan dynamics among the current cosponsors. Members treat everyday legislation as generalized position-taking motivated by reelection, yet for key legislation, legislators are policy-oriented. With a new dataset of over 73,000 bills introduced in both chambers of the Texas state legislature in the 75th to 86th regular sessions (1997–2020), we use pooled Cox proportional hazard models to evaluate the dynamics of when legislators legislate, comparing all bills introduced with a subset of key bills. The results show that legislators time their cosponsorship activity in response to electoral vulnerability, partisanship, and the dynamics of the chamber in which they serve.","PeriodicalId":47181,"journal":{"name":"State Politics & Policy Quarterly","volume":"23 1","pages":"245 - 266"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43182857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
D. Fortunato, Joshua McCrain, Kaylyn Jackson Schiff
Abstract Evidence suggests that well-funded, professional legislatures more effectively provide constituents with their preferred policies and may improve social welfare. Yet, legislative resources across state legislatures have stagnated or dwindled at least in part due to public antagonism toward increasing representatives’ salaries. We argue that one reason voters oppose legislative resources, like salary and staff, is that they are unaware of the potential benefits. Employing a pre-registered survey experiment with a pre–post design, we find that subjects respond positively to potential social welfare benefits of professionalization, increasing support for greater resources. We also find that individuals identifying with the legislative majority party respond positively to potential responsiveness benefits and that out-partisans do not respond negatively to potential responsiveness costs. In a separate survey of political elites, we find similar patterns. These results suggest that a key barrier to increasing legislative professionalism – anticipated public backlash – may not be insurmountable. The findings also highlight a challenge of institutional choice: beliefs that representatives are unresponsive or ineffective lead to governing institutions that may ensure these outcomes.
{"title":"Public Support for Professional Legislatures","authors":"D. Fortunato, Joshua McCrain, Kaylyn Jackson Schiff","doi":"10.1017/spq.2023.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2023.6","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Evidence suggests that well-funded, professional legislatures more effectively provide constituents with their preferred policies and may improve social welfare. Yet, legislative resources across state legislatures have stagnated or dwindled at least in part due to public antagonism toward increasing representatives’ salaries. We argue that one reason voters oppose legislative resources, like salary and staff, is that they are unaware of the potential benefits. Employing a pre-registered survey experiment with a pre–post design, we find that subjects respond positively to potential social welfare benefits of professionalization, increasing support for greater resources. We also find that individuals identifying with the legislative majority party respond positively to potential responsiveness benefits and that out-partisans do not respond negatively to potential responsiveness costs. In a separate survey of political elites, we find similar patterns. These results suggest that a key barrier to increasing legislative professionalism – anticipated public backlash – may not be insurmountable. The findings also highlight a challenge of institutional choice: beliefs that representatives are unresponsive or ineffective lead to governing institutions that may ensure these outcomes.","PeriodicalId":47181,"journal":{"name":"State Politics & Policy Quarterly","volume":"23 1","pages":"327 - 339"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45750312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Do reserved seats yield substantive representation for traditionally marginalized groups? To answer that question, we turn to a remarkable and little-studied institution: reserved seats for Native American tribes in the Maine House of Representatives. Tribal representatives, who can participate in debate but lack a vote, have represented tribes in Maine’s House of Representatives since statehood in 1820. We take advantage of a 1995 rule change that allowed tribal representatives to initiate legislation, and an original dataset of pro-tribal bills, to estimate the effect of reserved seats on the production of pro-tribal bills. We find that once tribal representatives were allowed to write bills, they produced over half of all tribal-related legislation during a 36-year period. Legislators with tribal constituents sponsored fewer relevant bills after the reform but continued to cosponsor pro-tribal legislation. Although our results show tribal representatives contribute to the legislative process, we caution that reserved seats are not a panacea for improving Indigenous representation.
{"title":"Do Reserved Seats Work? Evidence from Tribal Representatives in Maine","authors":"Cameron DeHart, Elliot Mamet","doi":"10.1017/spq.2023.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2023.2","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Do reserved seats yield substantive representation for traditionally marginalized groups? To answer that question, we turn to a remarkable and little-studied institution: reserved seats for Native American tribes in the Maine House of Representatives. Tribal representatives, who can participate in debate but lack a vote, have represented tribes in Maine’s House of Representatives since statehood in 1820. We take advantage of a 1995 rule change that allowed tribal representatives to initiate legislation, and an original dataset of pro-tribal bills, to estimate the effect of reserved seats on the production of pro-tribal bills. We find that once tribal representatives were allowed to write bills, they produced over half of all tribal-related legislation during a 36-year period. Legislators with tribal constituents sponsored fewer relevant bills after the reform but continued to cosponsor pro-tribal legislation. Although our results show tribal representatives contribute to the legislative process, we caution that reserved seats are not a panacea for improving Indigenous representation.","PeriodicalId":47181,"journal":{"name":"State Politics & Policy Quarterly","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134993703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract A growing literature has revealed a notable electoral advantage for congressional and gubernatorial candidates with deep local roots in their home districts or states. However, there is a dearth of research on the presence and impact of local roots in state legislative races. In this paper, we close that gap by demonstrating the consistent and significant electoral impacts that state legislators’ local roots have on their reelection efforts. We use data capturing a representative cross-section of state legislative incumbents (N = ~5,000) and calculate a novel index measuring the depth of their local roots modeled after Hunt’s (2022, Home Field Advantage: Roots, Reelection, and Representation in the Modern Congress) measure for the US House. We present evidence that state legislators with deep local roots in the districts they represent run unopposed in their general elections nearly twice as often as incumbents with no such roots. Of those who do attract challengers in their reelection efforts, deeply rooted incumbents enjoy an average of three extra percentage points of vote share. Our results have important implications for candidate emergence in state legislative elections during a time when so many are uncontested. They also demonstrate the limits of electoral nationalization for understanding state politics.
摘要越来越多的文献揭示了在家乡地区或州有着深厚地方根基的国会和州长候选人在选举中的显著优势。然而，关于地方根源在州立法选举中的存在和影响，缺乏研究。在这篇论文中，我们通过展示州立法者的地方根源对他们的连任努力产生的持续而重大的选举影响来缩小这一差距。我们使用捕捉州立法现任者代表性横截面的数据（N=~5000），并根据Hunt（2022，Home Field Advantage：roots，Relection，and Representation in the Modern Congress）对美国众议院的衡量标准，计算出一个衡量其地方根源深度的新指数。我们提供的证据表明，在他们所代表的地区有着深厚地方根基的州议员在大选中无对手参选的频率几乎是没有地方根基的现任议员的两倍。在那些在连任努力中吸引挑战者的人中，根深蒂固的现任者平均多获得三个百分点的选票。我们的结果对候选人在州立法选举中的出现具有重要意义，因为在这个时代，许多人都没有竞争对手。他们还展示了选举国有化对理解国家政治的局限性。
{"title":"Local Candidate Roots and Electoral Advantages in US State Legislatures","authors":"C. Hunt, Stella M. Rouse","doi":"10.1017/spq.2023.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2023.5","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A growing literature has revealed a notable electoral advantage for congressional and gubernatorial candidates with deep local roots in their home districts or states. However, there is a dearth of research on the presence and impact of local roots in state legislative races. In this paper, we close that gap by demonstrating the consistent and significant electoral impacts that state legislators’ local roots have on their reelection efforts. We use data capturing a representative cross-section of state legislative incumbents (N = ~5,000) and calculate a novel index measuring the depth of their local roots modeled after Hunt’s (2022, Home Field Advantage: Roots, Reelection, and Representation in the Modern Congress) measure for the US House. We present evidence that state legislators with deep local roots in the districts they represent run unopposed in their general elections nearly twice as often as incumbents with no such roots. Of those who do attract challengers in their reelection efforts, deeply rooted incumbents enjoy an average of three extra percentage points of vote share. Our results have important implications for candidate emergence in state legislative elections during a time when so many are uncontested. They also demonstrate the limits of electoral nationalization for understanding state politics.","PeriodicalId":47181,"journal":{"name":"State Politics & Policy Quarterly","volume":"23 1","pages":"233 - 243"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46630117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The Internet has spawned a renewed hope for facilitating increased access to candidate information for voters. However, the nationalization and polarization of constituents have left many candidates averse to the risks of personalized campaigns, especially in subnational elections. Under what conditions are state candidates willing to establish a personalized web presence as opposed to relying on partisanship? This study introduces a novel dataset of campaign website presence for the 2018 and 2020 state legislative elections. During this time, approximately one-third of state legislative candidates opted to forgo a personalized campaign website. District-level constituent ideology was significantly correlated with the website use, even when controlling for district education, income, age, and race, and the candidate’s competitive position. District ideological homogeneity encouraged website use across both parties, while adversarial district ideology corresponded to low website use among Republicans. The results indicate that state legislative candidates, especially Republican candidates, are far more likely to preach to their partisan choir rather than incur the risks of proselytizing among their partisan opposition. The results reiterate the divergent responses of the political parties regarding partisan polarization and shed light on the impact of nationalization within state legislative campaigns.
{"title":"Preaching to the Choir or Proselytizing to the Opposition: Examining the Use of Campaign Websites in State Legislative Elections","authors":"Joshua Meyer-Gutbrod","doi":"10.1017/spq.2023.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2023.1","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Internet has spawned a renewed hope for facilitating increased access to candidate information for voters. However, the nationalization and polarization of constituents have left many candidates averse to the risks of personalized campaigns, especially in subnational elections. Under what conditions are state candidates willing to establish a personalized web presence as opposed to relying on partisanship? This study introduces a novel dataset of campaign website presence for the 2018 and 2020 state legislative elections. During this time, approximately one-third of state legislative candidates opted to forgo a personalized campaign website. District-level constituent ideology was significantly correlated with the website use, even when controlling for district education, income, age, and race, and the candidate’s competitive position. District ideological homogeneity encouraged website use across both parties, while adversarial district ideology corresponded to low website use among Republicans. The results indicate that state legislative candidates, especially Republican candidates, are far more likely to preach to their partisan choir rather than incur the risks of proselytizing among their partisan opposition. The results reiterate the divergent responses of the political parties regarding partisan polarization and shed light on the impact of nationalization within state legislative campaigns.","PeriodicalId":47181,"journal":{"name":"State Politics & Policy Quarterly","volume":"105 4","pages":"166 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41261568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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