Cynthia J. Bowling

Divided Government, Interest Representation, and Policy Differences: Competing Explanations of Gridlock in the Fifty States

Recent research has focused on divided government and interest representation as sources of legislative gridlock. We hypothesize that these two factors will differentially affect the legislative process in eight different policy areas even if they do not affect the overall output of legislation. Using data from the 50 states, we found that when a governor faced a legislature controlled by the opposition party, divided government did make passage of conflictual policy more difficult, When the control of the legislature itself was split, divided government had a positive (or insignificant) effect in less conflictual policy areas. Previous scholars have failed to detect the negative effects of divided government because the effects differed across policy areas. Interest group proliferation also decreased the odds of bill passage in some policy areas but increased the odds in other arenas. It is important to examine interest groups and divided government in tandem to understand their relative impacts upon the policy process in the states.

Exploring Explanations of State Agency Budgets: Institutional Budget Actors or Exogenous Environment?

Budgetary incrementalism argues that three institutional actorsagencies, executive budget offices, and legislative committeesdominate budget outcomes. The complexity and interdependency of public programs expands this expectation to include the influence of exogenous budget factors. Findings from a survey of state agency heads reveal that budget environments do influence state agency budget outcomes. However, the institutional budgetary participants, especially governors and legislatures, envisioned in classical incrementalism retain their principal and primary influence on state agency budgets. A significant departure from classical incrementalism is that agencies are not as influential as previously depicted.

Public Administration in the Fifty States: A Half-Century Administrative Revolution:

State and Local Government Review NEARLY A HALF CENTURY AGO, Robert S. Allen described state government as “the tawdriest, most incompetent, most stultifying unit in the nation’s political structure” (1949,vii). While Allen’s journalistic broadside against state government was aimed mainly at sordid politics and outdated political institutions, the states’ administrative failures did not escape his wrath. He charged that

State-Level Measures of Institutional Budgetary Influence from the American State Administrators Project 1964–98

The American State Administrators Project is a half-century long research program surveying the attitudes and behavior of state agency leaders. The project has produced a voluminous number of publications and conference papers. At the same time it has also faced several difficulties in making its data more widely available to the scholarly community. This paper describes the Project, some of the data difficulties it has faced, and the portion of the data being distributed with this article.

Introduction: The State of Polarization in the States

In American politics, the two major political parties are more separated ideologically than at any point in the last fifty years. This separation, commonly referred to as polarization, implies an intense disagreement in the preferred policy solutions and preferences of political actors. It is well known that American political elites, especially those in the national political context, have been polarized for some time (Theriault 2008; Fleisher and Bond 2004; Wood and Jordan Forthcoming). Evidence at the mass level is more mixed; it is unclear whether American individuals hold relatively moderate (Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2011) or more extreme (Abramowitz and Saunders 2008) policy positions. At the very least, citizens’ evaluations of the other party have grown more extremely negative (so-called affective polarization; Iyengar and Westwood 2015). While polarization in the national political arena is evident with every media story as well as at the forefront of American politics research, we have had less exploration of this phenomenon at any subnational level. State government scholars have measured ideology of citizens and elites (Erikson, Wright, and McIver 1993; Berry et al. 1998), party competition (Ranney 1976), and divided government (Bowling and Ferguson 2001). More recently, Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope (2011) made a cross-state comparisons of political polarization. Broadly, over the last several years, scholars have begun discussing “fragmented federalism” or how party polarization might impact and complicate policymaking in states (Gamkhar and Pickerill 2012; Bowling and Pickerill 2013). States make policy on most issues directly impacting their citizens as well as implement federal law and rules: in these “laboratories of democracy,” policy can be innovative, mainstream, or ideologically extreme. Thus, it becomes extremely important to investigate the extent of polarization among state elites and among individuals within states to understand the effect of either form of polarization on the politics within the states. The special issue of State and Local Government Review begins this exploration. It features five articles illustrating important potential consequence of polarization within the states. The articles address changing an individual’s perception of state governments, citizen evaluations of the policy outputs of the states, and, perhaps more importantly, the effects of polarization on the policy outputs themselves. We introduce these papers individually after briefly outlining the broader improvements in data availability that have made such state-level research a possibility.