Time is on (The Party's) Side: State Institutional Control and Representational Bias.

This analysis expands on previous scholarly work by highlighting a source of representational bias. Where Erickson, Wright, and McIver (1989, 1993) show that public opinion and state policy tend to correlate significantly, they do leave open the question of possible sources of bias. More recent scholarly work (Bartels 2008, for example) highlights the representational disparity along economic lines. This paper attempts to analyze the other side of the same coin by focusing on the effect of duration of institutional control. I theorize that the longer one party holds onto control of state institutions, the larger the gap between the policy outcomes of the government and wishes of the people. Using a standard measure of citizen and state government ideology (Berry et al. 1998), this paper employs the absolute difference between state and citizen ideology as a measure of bias for the time span of 1984-2010. I also include specific policy dependent variables to capture the relationship on both macro and micro-levels of policy. By including a measure of length of party control as well as various controls, this paper shows that the longer one party controls state governments, the distance between government and citizen ideology tends to grow. Such an analysis should add to the literature by pointing to an additional source of representational bias stemming from the duration of institutional control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]