Suchergebnisse

Does control of patronage jobs significantly increase a political party's chances of winning elections in U.S. states? We employ a differences-in-differences design, exploiting the considerable variation in the dates that different states adopted civil service reforms. Our evidence suggests that political parties in U.S. states were able to use state-level patronage to increase the probability of maintaining control of state legislatures and statewide elective offices. We also find that an "entrenched" party, in power for a longer time, can use patronage more effectively. We consider several alternative hypotheses that might plausibly account for the patterns in the data, but find no evidence to support them.

State legislatures have variable levels of professionalism. Measures of state legislative professionalism typically include metrics such as the number of legislative staff, legislative session length, and legislator compensation. This research considers the influence of variability in levels of legislative professionalism on the states oversight process. Few prior studies engage the legislative oversight process in states. To fill this gap, this research takes a grounded theory approach that uses thirty-three interviews with legislators, legislative staff, committee staff, and legislative research organizations in five states to test existing concepts and to develop new directions for research. The current scholarship on oversight and legislative institutions emphasizes the importance of broad factors like elections and committees, as well as more specific concepts like inter-branch conflict, partisanship, and legislative term-limits. This research confirms and extends those ideas, reaching the conclusion that oversight in states is a deeply political action. A central contribution of this work is a consideration of how the oversight process in states operates on the ground. The interviews uncover that many measures of professionalism often perform in unforeseen ways than what might expected. For instance, a lengthy legislative session can prohibit oversight actors from performing oversight functions. Conversely, long legislative interim periods provide actors with the space to conduct meaningful reviews of administrative action. This research also advances understandings of state legislative research organizations like the Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission and Texas Sunset Commission which play a vital role in performing meaningful legislative oversight. To catalyze these ideas a new concept, the oversight entrepreneur, is used to describe how stakeholders use the oversight process to achieve their preferences and enhance their reputations. The interviews contained here also expose the importance of each states individual context including Constitutional, institutional, normed and historical factors. The dissimilarities that play out across states (and their secondary effects) demonstrate that future scholars would be well served to adopt caution in the application of concepts across contexts. ; Ph. D.

ObjectiveThe role of institutions in state politics has been recognized for decades. However, most of this research has evaluated the role of a single institution at a time, such as the role of the ballot initiative or legislative professionalism. Little is known about how institutions may have counterbalancing or reinforcing effects.MethodI propose evaluating institutions collectively much in the way that comparative politics scholars have evaluated the collective set of institutions that create levels of democracy.ResultsThrough an exploratory factor analysis, I find that state institutions can primarily be understood along two dimensions, accountability pressure and checks and balances. I use a Bayesian factor analysis of mixed data to generate institutional scores for all 50 states along both dimensions from 1975 to 2016.ConclusionTheses scores will be a resource to understand how a state`s collective institutional environment affects a wide variety of phenomena, from policy responsiveness to voter turnout or policy innovation.

AN EVALUATION OF RECENT LITERATURE ON U.S. STATE LEGISLATURES DURING THE LAST TWO DECADES. TOPICS INCLUDE LEGISLATIVE RECRUITMENT AND ELECTIONS, CAREER PATTERNS, ORGANIZATION AND STRUCTURE, ROLES AND NORMS, CONSTITUENCY REPRESENTATION, LEGISLATIVE DECISION-MAKING, BUDGETING AND OVERSIGHT.

AbstractAs numerous pieces of past research have shown, the opinions of state residents significantly influence the politics and policies of the 50 U.S. states. This type of research flourished when aggregate-level indicators of overall state ideology and partisanship were devised from pooled national public opinion polls. This article provides an extension of such research by devising, from state surveys, aggregate-level measures of the ideological and partisan orientations of racial and ethnic minority voters, as well as that of white voters. These new data demonstrate that the opinions of African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans vary across the states, and in many cases, significantly alter the political orientations of a state's citizenry. These data will facilitate research that incorporates racial and ethnic diversity in the study of public opinion, U.S. state politics, and policy.