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AbstractScholars posit that groups play an important role in the legislative process and legislator decision making, but find these questions difficult to empirically study due to the private information exchanges. This article exploits a legislative reporting institution to explore group involvement in policy making. In the California state legislature, extra-legislative individuals or organizations that write legislation and secure a legislator to author the bill may be listed as sponsors. Data come from California bill analyses and extend from 1993 to 2014. This group tactic is frequently used: 40% of bills introduced and over 60% of bills that become law list an extra-legislative sponsor. Group sponsorship is significantly related to passage, even after matching on a number of covariates. Legislators use fewer group bills and substitute out of group bills as they gain experience. Group input serves as an integral part of a legislative portfolio and the agenda-setting stage of legislative decision making.

Bureaucratic influence in policymaking is often described as occurring subsequent to the legislative process and scholars argue that the legislative branch strategically constrains the bureaucracy via statutory language. A reality which complicates these claims and separation of powers research is that bureaucrats frequently play a role in creating the laws which ultimately govern their behavior. This project examines the extent to which bureaucrats attempt to and succeed in securing their preferred statutory language. I track bills introduced at bureaucrats' request across 11 state legislatures. Legislatures extensively draw from agencies' expertise in forming the agenda and crafting session law, with 9% of introduced bills and 21% of law coming from bureaucrats. A difference‐in‐differences analysis shows that committee chairs and legislators in the majority introduce more administration‐initiated bills. Bureaucrats' extensive involvement in crafting statutory law and increased use in less professional legislatures imply that extant statutory control studies miss an important interaction.

The U.S. House and Senate were designed to have an adversarial relationship. Yet, House members and senators often collaborate on the introduction of "companion" bills. We develop a theory of these cross-chamber collaborations, which asserts that companion bill introductions are driven by legislators' desire to increase the probability of bill passage and the relational difficulties in developing companion bill partnerships. To test the expectations emerging from our theory, we develop a novel data set of every companion bill introduction in the 111th and 112th U.S. Congress. Then, using social networking techniques, we develop an empirical model of partner selection in companion bill introduction. Our results are supportive of our expectations, and suggest that companion bills are more likely to survive chamber deliberation and are typically introduced by senior members with secure electoral margins.

Recent media reports imply that corporations, industry groups, and think tanks exercise outsized influence in state legislatures by promoting model legislation. Before making sweeping claims about how special interests dominate the legislative process, it is essential to compare their purported influence to that of other sources. This article performs such a comparison by applying textual analysis to two original datasets—one including over 2400 state bills that challenge 12 national policies and one including more than 1000 model bills. It finds that lawmakers are more likely to develop legislation internally or rely on legislation from other states than to use model bills. These results suggest that while special interests can sometimes exploit the safeguards of federalism to advance their partisan goals, that dynamic is far from the norm.

AbstractIn contemporary democracies, backsliding typically occurs through legal machinations. Self‐enforcing democracy requires that political parties refrain from exploiting legal opportunities to tilt electoral rules. Using a formal model, we argue that informal norms of mutual forbearance and formal constitutional rules are fundamentally intertwined via a logic of deterrence. By circumscribing how far each party can legally bend the rules, legal bounds create reversion points if mutual forbearance collapses. If legal bounds are symmetric between parties, they deter electoral tilting by making credible each party's threat to punish transgressions by the other. If legal bounds become sufficiently asymmetric, however, the foundations for forbearance crumble. Asymmetries emerge when some groups (a) are more vulnerable than others to legally permissible electoral distortions and (b) favored and disfavored groups sort heavily into parties. We apply this mechanism to explain gerrymandering and voting rights in the United States in the post‐Civil Rights era.

AbstractThe safeguards of federalism provide state officials with several tools as they try to influence national policy and protect their interests. State legislative challenges to the national government have been widespread recently, yet little is known about their origins. Are they derived from model legislation provided by interest groups, the result of state-to-state emulation, or developed independently by individual states? This article uses plagiarism detection software to offer a preliminary answer to this question. Our analysis suggests that state officials only occasionally rely on model legislation in drafting resistance measures. It also identifies variation across issues. External sources seem to have the greatest impact on legislation resisting gun control, a more modest influence on challenges to the Affordable Care Act, and a minimal effect on state-level responses to Common Core. The article further analyzes these dynamics by examining specific examples of textual overlap among resistance bills in each issue area.