All Journal Articles

View:
The Policy Blame Game: How Polarization Distorts Democratic Accountability across the Local, State, and Federal Level
The Policy Blame Game: How Polarization Distorts Democratic Accountability across the Local, State, and Federal Level

Democratic accountability relies on voters to punish their representatives for policies they dislike. Yet, a separation-of-powers system can make it hard to know who is to blame, and partisan biases further distort voters’ evaluations. During [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2022.21
Type: Journal Articles
Conference Committee Structure and Majority Party Bias in U.S. States
Conference Committee Structure and Majority Party Bias in U.S. States

How representative are conference delegations in state legislative chambers? I argue that differing conference rules across state legislative chambers influence majority party control over conference delegations. With an original data set enco [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2022.20
Type: Journal Articles
Evaluating Policy Mood Measures in the American States
Evaluating Policy Mood Measures in the American States

The scholarly exchange over approaches to measuring public preferences in the American states dates back several years. This introduction to the debate attempts to provide broad perspective on how scholars have conceptualized and measured poli [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2022.23
Type: Journal Articles
A Validation and Extension of State-Level Public Policy Mood: 1956–2020
A Validation and Extension of State-Level Public Policy Mood: 1956–2020

To fully understand state policy outcomes or elections in the US, we need valid over-time measures of state-level public opinion. We contribute to the research on measuring state public opinion in two ways. First, we respond to Berry, Fording, [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2021.26
Type: Journal Articles
Redistricting and Incarceration: Examining the Electoral Consequences of New York’s Prohibition on Prison Gerrymandering
Redistricting and Incarceration: Examining the Electoral Consequences of New York’s Prohibition on Prison Gerrymandering

During the most recent round of redistricting, many states have enacted a number of reforms to their mapmaking practices. One reform that has received increased attention in recent years is a ban on prison gerrymandering—the practice of counti [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2022.11
Type: Journal Articles
Using Social Media Data to Reveal Patterns of Policy Engagement in State Legislatures
Using Social Media Data to Reveal Patterns of Policy Engagement in State Legislatures

State governments are tasked with making important policy decisions in the United States. How do state legislators use their public communications—particularly social media—to engage with policy debates? Due to previous data limitations, we la [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2022.1
Type: Journal Articles
Measuring Executive Ideology and Its Influence
Measuring Executive Ideology and Its Influence

Executives are important elites, and ideology is important to elite behavior, but measurement challenges and a focus on the presidency have kept scholars from fully exploring executive ideology. This article advocates studying US governors to [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2021.34
Type: Journal Articles
Does Public Financing Motivate Electoral Challengers?
Does Public Financing Motivate Electoral Challengers?

Do attempts to level the financial playing field lead more candidates to run for office? In theory, public financing should increase competition, presumably because additional funding from taxpayers motivates more challengers to run for office [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2022.12
Type: Journal Articles
New Data on Court Curbing by State Legislatures
New Data on Court Curbing by State Legislatures

The examination of the interaction between the institutions in American state politics has long suffered from a dearth of data. This is the case despite the importance of understanding the separation of powers in the states and the specific ef [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2022.8
Type: Journal Articles
The Politics of Bicameral Agreement: Why and When Do State Lawmakers Go to Conference?
The Politics of Bicameral Agreement: Why and When Do State Lawmakers Go to Conference?

The power of conference committees is well documented and studied by scholars of the US Congress. But little is known about politics of bicameral agreement within state legislatures. Leveraging variation across states, I explore the conditions [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2022.4
Type: Journal Articles
Amidst pandemic and racial upheaval: Where Asian Americans Fit
Amidst pandemic and racial upheaval: Where Asian Americans Fit

As racial tensions flare amidst a global pandemic and national social justice upheaval, the centrality of structural racism has renewed old questions and raised new ones about where Asian Americans fit in U.S. politics. This paper provides an [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/rep.2020.46
Type: Journal Articles
Racialized Anti-Statism and the Failure of the American State
Racialized Anti-Statism and the Failure of the American State

How well do we understand the political moment in which we find ourselves in the wake of the Trump presidency? The United States has long failed to keep up with its democratic peers on a wide range of social outcomes but the struggle to keep a [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/rep.2020.41
Type: Journal Articles
White Americans’ Reactions to Racial Disparities in COVID-19
White Americans’ Reactions to Racial Disparities in COVID-19

I fielded a survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of 591 white Americans to test whether exposure to information about the disparate impact of COVID-19 on Black people influenced white Americans’ opinion about COVID-19 polici [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305542200051X
Type: Journal Articles
Prejudiced When Climbing Up or When Falling Down? Why Some People of Color Express Anti-Black Racism
Prejudiced When Climbing Up or When Falling Down? Why Some People of Color Express Anti-Black Racism

We contend that some people of color express anti-Black prejudice to cope with their own marginalization. Individuals stationed along an in-group’s periphery are often motivated to exclude others to bolster their own belonging in a community. [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422000545
Type: Journal Articles
The Representational Consequences of Municipal Civil Service Reform
The Representational Consequences of Municipal Civil Service Reform

A prominent argument holds that the chief purpose of municipal civil service reform in the United States was to dislodge the overrepresentation of recent immigrants in city government. Using new data on all municipal employees from 1850 to 194 [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422000521
Type: Journal Articles
Policy Threat, Partisanship, and the Case of the Affordable Care Act
Policy Threat, Partisanship, and the Case of the Affordable Care Act

How do political conditions influence whether public support develops for a new policy? Specifically, does the presence of partisan polarization and a viable threat to a policy’s continuation prevent the emergence of such support? We propose a [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422000612
Type: Journal Articles
The Politics of Police Data: State Legislative Capacity and the Transparency of State and Substate Agencies
The Politics of Police Data: State Legislative Capacity and the Transparency of State and Substate Agencies

Police, like other bureaucratic agencies, are responsible for collecting and disseminating policy-relevant data. Nonetheless, critical data, including killings by police, often go unreported. We argue that this is due in part to the limited ov [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422000624
Type: Journal Articles
Moderates
Moderates

Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422000818
Type: Journal Articles
Competition in Congressional Elections: Money versus Votes
Competition in Congressional Elections: Money versus Votes

Competition among candidates or parties is a necessary condition for democracy. But who counts as a candidate and what counts as competition? The influence of money in American elections makes fundraising an appropriate alternative to vote tot [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422000764
Type: Journal Articles
Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding
Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding

The Trump presidency generated concern about democratic backsliding and renewed interest in measuring the national democratic performance of the United States. However, the US has a decentralized form of federalism that administers democratic [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422000934
Type: Journal Articles
Ticketing and Turnout: The Participatory Consequences of Low-Level Police Contact
Ticketing and Turnout: The Participatory Consequences of Low-Level Police Contact

The American criminal legal system is an important site of political socialization: scholars have shown that criminal legal contact reduces turnout and that criminalization pushes people away from public institutions more broadly. Despite this [...]

License: CC BY
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422001265
Type: Journal Articles
Progressive familial socialization and white partisans’ racial attitudes
Progressive familial socialization and white partisans’ racial attitudes

Scholars have correlated the racial attitudes of White partisans with a number of explanatory variables, including ingroup favoritism and outgroup prejudice. Notwithstanding the importance of these variables, scholars have neglected other cons [...]

License: CC BY-NC-ND
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2021.1932529
Type: Journal Articles
Do Americans perceive diverse judges as inherently biased?
Do Americans perceive diverse judges as inherently biased?

Although women and minorities hold an increasing share of judgships in the United States, they remain underrepresented. We explore Americans’ perceptions of the bias of women and minority judges – one of the possible challenges to creating a d [...]

License: CC BY-NC-ND
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2021.1960867
Type: Journal Articles
Cultural attributions for racial inequality
Cultural attributions for racial inequality

How do people explain persistent inequality between whites and blacks? Research has focused on two dimensions of explanation, or attribution: internal (regarding shortcomings in black motivation and capability); and external (regarding the soc [...]

License: CC BY-NC-ND
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2022.2061361
Type: Journal Articles