Search

Public opinion polls consistently show that a growing majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. Critics, however, raise the possibility that these polls are plagued by social desirability bias, and thereby may overstate public support for gay and lesbian rights. We test this proposition using a list experiment embedded in the 2013 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. List experiments afford respondents an anonymity that allows them to provide more truthful answer potentially sensitive survey items. Our experiment finds no evidence that social desirability is affecting overall survey results. Indeed, our efforts provide new evidence that a national opinion majority favors same-sex marriage. To evaluate the robustness of our findings, we analyze a second list experiment, this one focusing on the inclusion of sexual orientation in employment nondiscrimination laws. Again we find no overall evidence of bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do America's chief executives get what they want out of the legislative process when their only formal power comes when bills arrive on their desks? We argue that executives are often able to get what they want by using their veto pen as a positive power and by relying upon a variety of additional carrots and sticks. We illustrate the logic of our argument by adapting Romer and Rosenthals's (1978) "setter model." We explain the intuition behind our model using case studies and interviews with politicians and advisors who have participated in inter-branch negotiations. To test our model's predictions about the determinants of gubernatorial success we have compiled a dataset of gubernatorial proposals from 52 State of the State addresses delivered in 27 states over two recent legislative sessions. We gauge success by asking whether legislators eventually passed what governors proposed, either in its original form or in "half-a-loaf" compromises. We supplement this data with institutional and political variables. Overall we show that governors get either most or some of what they want on over 50 percent of their legislative proposals. We also demonstrate that variation in success is often shaped by the governors' policy preferences, veto powers, popularity, and time remaining in office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how well states translate public opinion into policy and explain state variation in democratic performance, assessing the influence of preferences, institutions, and politics. Using national surveys and advances in opinion estimation, we create new estimates of state-level support for 39 policies across 8 issue areas, including abortion, law enforcement, health care, and education. We differentiate between responsiveness to opinion and congruence with opinion majorities. Policy is highly responsiveness to policy-specific opinion even after controlling for the ideology of voters and elected officials. However, there is a large "democratic deficit"-- states are only successful at matching policy with opinion majorities about half of the time, and clear majority support is often insufficient for policy adoption. We find that certain political institutions, specifically legislative professionalization and term limits, enhance the opinion-policy linkage. Other factors, such as participation, electoral competition, and state culture, explain little. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop and test a model of how features of local political institutions affect the responsiveness of local governments to changing social, economic, and political circumstances. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we compare the two main approaches for estimating state-level public opinion: disaggregation by state of pooled national surveys, as pioneered by Erikson, Wright, and McIver (1993), and the updated simulation or imputation approach of Park, Gelman, and Bafumi (2006), which relies on poststratification and multilevel logistic regression. We assess the predictive accuracy of each and examine whether and how their predictions are affected by changes in sample size and state population. To do so, we use cross-validation and a dataset of over 100 national and state surveys asking respondents their opinions of same-sex marriage. We find that, under ideal conditions, both methods work well. However, we also find that imputation is clearly superior to disaggregation when data samples are small to medium sized and that imputation (unlike disaggregation) performs equally as well on small as on large samples. The results presented here have important implications for future efforts to measure state-level public opinion. Chief among these is that imputation can be used to accurately estimate state public opinion using a single large national survey. This should greatly expand the number of issues for which researchers can study opinion directly or as an influence on policymaking. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we compare the two main approaches for estimating state-level public opinion: disaggregation by state of pooled national surveys, as pioneered by Erikson, Wright, and McIver (1993), and the updated simulation or imputation approach of Park, Gelman, and Bafumi (2006), which relies on poststratification and multilevel logistic regression. We assess the predictive accuracy of each and examine whether and how their predictions are affected by changes in sample size and state population. To do so, we use cross-validation and a dataset of over 100 national and state surveys asking respondents their opinions of same-sex marriage. We find that, under ideal conditions, both methods work well. However, we also find that imputation is clearly superior to disaggregation when data samples are small to medium sized and that imputation (unlike disaggregation) performs equally as well on small as on large samples. The results presented here have important implications for future efforts to measure state-level public opinion. Chief among these is that imputation can be used to accurately estimate state public opinion using a single large national survey. This should greatly expand the number of issues for which researchers can study opinion directly or as an influence on policymaking. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we take advantage of five recent changes in the partisan control of state legislatures to assess the value, in terms of campaign contributions, of majority status. Overall, our econometric estimations show the value of majority status ranges from $26,000 in New Jersey to approximately $6,000 in Missouri. Not surprisingly, the magnitude of this value appears to be positively related to the professionalization of the legislative chamber under study as well as the extent to which the chamber is organized along party lines. The results presented here have important implications for existing theories of legislative organization as well as the discipline's understanding of the behavior of favor-seeking interest groups. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests the hypothesis that the existence and use of the citizen initiative attenuates party influence in state fiscal policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disciplines of political science and economics offer two distinct explanations of tax policy in subnational governments. Political science treats subnational units as quasi-independent political systems arguing that their revenue policies will reflect the outcomes of local electoral competition as well as bargaining between elected officials. Microeconomic theory, on the other hand, holds that both the amount of revenue states collect and the quantity of public goods and services they provide are constrained by inter-jurisdictional competition over mobile capital and labor. As a result, economists predict that the tax policies of subnational governments will be conditioned by the actions of their competitors. This paper tests these rival hypotheses in the context of the American states. Using an original data set of enacted revenue measures, I estimate the determinants of annual changes in state tax policy for fiscal years 1988 through 2001. My estimation strategy relies upon the 2SLS-IV approach recommended by Anselin (1988) and Kelejian and Robinson (1993) for use with spatial econometric models. Overall, I find evidence that supports both the political and market competition hypotheses. The model shows that, on average, Democratically controlled and split legislatures increase per-capita taxes significantly more than those in which the Republican party is the majority - by $19 and $12 respectively. At the same time, however, changes in state tax policy appear to be strongly shaped by the actions of competitor states. My results indicate that an enacted tax increase of $1 per capita by a state?s competitors leads the state to enact a similar tax increase of $0.36 per-capita. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When governors and legislators clash over the size of state government, what strategic factors determine who will win? Previous studies have imported setter or spatial models from the Congressional literature, and predict that legislatures will usually be able to set the terms of the bargain. We argue that state budget negotiations instead follow the "staring match" logic captured by the games of Rubinstein (1982, 1985) and Osborne and Rubinstein (1990). In these models, the importance of proposal power and the status quo policy are swamped by the political and personal costs of a delayed budget. We predict that governors will often be powerful, and that their influence depends upon whether they face legislators with the professional resources to be patient. To test these expectations, we construct an original dataset of annual gubernatorial budget proposals and corresponding legislative enactments over a fifteen-year period. Our empirical analysis generates strong support for our model. We find striking evidence of gubernatorial strength in budgetary negotiations as well as strong support for our hypothesis that governors are most successful when negotiating with a citizen legislature. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the determinants and consequences of public opinion on gay rights issues (e.g., same-sex marriage, civil unions, same-sex adoption, and employment non-discrimination). We analyze dozens of national surveys of public opinion on specific state policies using recent advances in multilevel modeling, allowing us to estimate the effects of key demographic predictors such as age, education, gender, race, and religion, while also modeling differences across states and regions. We then generate highly accurate estimates of opinion within each state on each issue using census data to poststratify by demographic composition. Next, we explore the sensitivity of governmental policy to public opinion, considering both responsiveness across states and congruence within each state. We find that that the demographic predictors above all have strong effects, but that these effects vary significantly over policies. We also show clear differences across states and regions in pro-gay support, again varying across policy areas, with a clear divide between issues of personal relationships and issues of economic fairness or justice. Finally, we show a high degree of policy responsiveness, but also persistent incongruence. In some policy areas, even supermajority support appears insufficient for policy adoption, particularly in those policies relating to economic fairness. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While gay and lesbian rights have become controversial, high-profile issues in contemporary American politics, scholars know relatively little about what drives federal policymaking in this area. In this paper, we consider a likely determinant of government action--public opinion--by investigating the relationship between the roll call votes of members of Congress on gay rights legislation issues and the policy-specific preferences of their constituents. For each state and congressional district, we use national-level surveys and advances in multi-level modeling to estimate the preferences of constituents on bills relating to same-sex marriage, hate crimes, employment non-discrimination, and military service. We then use these estimates to examine the effects of policy-specific opinion on the corresponding roll call votes. In addition to constituent opinion, our models of legislator behavior include variables that capture the partisan identification, ideology, and personal characteristics of individual lawmakers. We can thus evaluate the effect of constituent opinion relative to other potential and know determinants of roll call votes. Overall, our results will contribute to our understanding of democratic representation, policy responsiveness, and legislative behavior surrounding civil rights issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project uses multilevel modeling techniques to estimate state-level policy preferences for more and less affluent Americans. We then relate these preferences to actual state policy to assess the responsiveness of state policymakers to public preferences and the extent to which that responsiveness differs for the poor, the middle-class and the affluent. Finally, we examine the influence on representation and representational inequality of state-level characteristics like economic inequality, party competition, partisan polarization, campaign finance regulations, interest group environment, term limits, and legislative professionalization. This paper details our analytic strategy and presents some preliminary results based on the first 12 policy issues we have examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]