Justin H. Phillips

Gay Rights in the States: Public Opinion and Policy Responsiveness

We study the effects of policy-specific public opinion on state adoption of policies affecting gays and lesbians, and the factors that condition this relationship. Using national surveys and advances in opinion estimation, we create new estimates of state-level support for eight policies, including civil unions and nondiscrimination laws. We differentiate between responsiveness to opinion and congruence with opinion majorities. We find a high degree of responsiveness, controlling for interest group pressure and the ideology of voters and elected officials. Policy salience strongly increases the influence of policy-specific opinion (directly and relative to general voter ideology). There is, however, a surprising amount of noncongruence—for some policies, even clear supermajority support seems insufficient for adoption. When noncongruent, policy tends to be more conservative than desired by voters; that is, there is little progay policy bias. We find little to no evidence that state political institutions affect policy responsiveness or congruence.

Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees

Does public opinion influence Supreme Court confirmation politics? We present the first direct evidence that state-level public opinion on whether a particular Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed affects the roll call votes of senators. Using national polls and applying recent advances in opinion estimation, we produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of nine recent Supreme Court nominees in all 50 states. We find that greater home-state public support does significantly and strikingly increase the probability that a senator will vote to approve a nominee, even controlling for other predictors of roll call voting. These results establish a systematic and powerful link between constituency opinion and voting on Supreme Court nominees. We connect this finding to larger debates on the role of majoritarianism and representation.

Direct Democracy and Land Use Policy: Exchanging Public Goods for Development Rights

To counter the power of pro-development interests, growth opponents in American communities have increasingly turned to the institutions of direct democracy. This study analyses the effects of one type of direct democracy-voter requirements for new development-on municipal growth. Analysing data from a sample of California communities, we consider the impact of voter requirements on the land use process and outcomes. We find that—in general-voter requirements fail to stop new development; property owners and developers can and do adapt to the constraints created by these direct democracy institutions. We also find, however, that voter requirements change the land use process in important ways. Specifically, they change the way developers interact with interest groups in the community and force developers to compensate current residents for enduring some of the negative aspects of growth.

Development Ballot Measures, Interest Group Endorsements, and the Political Geography of Growth Preferences

In response to rapid population and economic growth, many communities have turned to voter initiatives to resolve their land use disputes. We find that despite strong public concern about growth, voters often support measures that allow or encourage new development. We consider the sources of this support by analyzing patterns of voting on a range of prodevelopment ballot initiatives. These initiatives provide a valuable opportunity to understand how economic self-interest, geography, interest group endorsements, and public goods affect citizen support for development policies. We find that interest group endorsements significantly increase public support for new development. These endorsements help voters evaluate the personal impact of complex development proposals and allow voters to behave in ways that reflect a high degree of sophistication.

A theory-based framework for evaluating exergames as persuasive technology

Exergames are video games that use exertion-based interfaces to promote physical activity, fitness, and gross motor skill development. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of an organizing framework based on principles of learning theory to classify and rank exergames according to embedded behavior change principles. Behavioral contingencies represent a key theory-based game design principle that can be objectively measured, evaluated, and manipulated to help explain and change the frequency and duration of game play. Case examples are presented that demonstrate how to code dimensions of behavior, consequences of behavior, and antecedents of behavior. Our framework may be used to identify game principles which, in the future, might be used to predict which games are most likely to promote adoption and maintenance of leisure time physical activity.

EVALUATING THE EFFECTS OF DIRECT DEMOCRACY ON PUBLIC POLICY California's Urban Growth Boundaries

This research addresses two interrelated questions about direct democracy: How does direct democracy affect public policy? And why do citizens and interest groups sometimes pursue policy change through direct democracy? We study these questions by testing for differences between urban growth boundaries (UGBs) that were enacted by city councils and by direct democracy in a large sample of California municipalities. We find that laws adopted at the ballot box are more extreme and are more difficult to amend or repeal. However, we also find that direct democracy does not result in less coherent or more fragmented policy regimes. In addition, we develop and test a model of the factors that lead political actors to pursue each strategy for policy change. Our results demonstrate that decisions to use the initiative process are largely a function of characteristics of local legislatures rather than citizen preferences for extreme policies.

Who blinks first?: Legislative patience and bargaining with governors

When legislators and governors clash over the size of American state government, what strategic factors determine who wins? Efforts to address this question have traditionally relied upon setter models borrowed from the congressional literature and have predicted legislative dominance. We offer an alternative simplification of state budget negotiations that follows the “staring match” logic captured by divide-the-dollar games. Our model predicts that governors will often be powerful but that professional legislatures can stand up to the executives when long legislative sessions give them the patience to endure a protracted battle over the size of the budget. In this article, we present our analysis of an original dataset comprising gubernatorial budget proposals and legislative enactments in the states from 1989 through 2004. The results indicate strong empirical support for our predictions.

Overcoming Fiscal Gridlock: Institutions and Budget Bargaining

We argue that the costs of bargaining failure are important determinants of legislative delay and gridlock. When these costs are high, elected officials have a greater incentive to reach legislative bargains, even if doing so means compromising on their policy objectives. We develop and evaluate this claim in the context of state budgeting, treating late budgets as examples of fiscal gridlock. Specifically, we argue that budgetary gridlock imposes political and private costs on lawmakers, the magnitudes of which are shaped by institutions and features of the political environment. Our expectations are tested and confirmed using an original dataset of the timing of budget adoption for all states over a 46-year period. Though our investigation is set in the context of the states, we show that differences in the costs of bargaining failure can also account for variation in the patterns of budgetary delay across levels of government and (to a lesser extent) variation in fiscal gridlock within the federal government.

Reform and Representation: A New Method Applied to Recent Electoral Changes

Can electoral reforms such as an independent redistricting commission and the top-two primary create conditions that lead to better legislative representation? We explore this question by presenting a new method for measuring a key indicator of representation – the congruence between a legislators ideological position and the average position of her districts voters. Our novel approach combines two methods: the joint classification of voters and political candidates on the same ideological scale, along with multilevel regression and post-stratification to estimate the position of the average voter across many districts in multiple elections. After validating our approach, we use it to study the recent impact of reforms in California, showing that they did not bring their hoped-for effects.

Spending within Limits: Evidence from Municipal Fiscal Restraints

This paper studies the role of a constitutional rule new to the literature: a limit placed by a city on its own ability to tax or spend. We find that such a limit exists in at least 1 in 8 cities, and that limits are not adopted in response to high levels of or variability in taxation. After limit adoption, municipal revenue growth declines by 16 to 22 percent. Our results suggest that institutional constraints may be effective when representative government falls short of the median voter ideal.