Description The Congress in Action Workbook, written with the support of the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office Zero Textbook Cost Program and Academic Senate for California Community Colleges Open Education Resources Initiative [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
We produced a free audiobook of American Government 3e, an OpenStax textbook. This textbook provides an introduction to US government and civics, and is used widely in college-level Political Science courses. We believe that this project will [...]
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 [...]