Paul Brace

Public Opinion in the American States: New Perspectives Using National Survey Data

General measures of ideology and partisanship derived from national survey data concatenated to the state level have been extremely important in understanding policy and political processes in the states. However, due to the lack of uniform survey data covering a broad array of survey questions, we know little about how specific state-level opinion relates to specific policies or processes. Using the General Social Survey (GSS) disaggregated to the state level, we develop and rigorously test specific measures of state-level opinion on tolerance, racial integration, abortion, religiosity, homosexuality, feminism, capital punishment, welfare, and the environment. To illustrate the utility of these measures, we compare the explanatory power of each to that of a general ideology measure. We use a simulation to clarify conditions under which a national sample frame can produce representative state samples. We offer these measures to advance the study of the role public opinion plays in state politics and policy. The public opinion-policy linkage is a crucial topic for democratic theorists and has preoccupied students of state government and politics for years. Without survey data at the state level, pioneering studies employed surrogates derived from demographic variables or simu? lations to judge the responsiveness of state policymaking to public prefer? ences (Plotnick and Winters 1985; Weber and Shaffer 1972). Some ingenious studies also explore the causes and consequences of public opinion using national survey data disaggregated to subnational units (Gibson 1989,1992,1995; Miller and Stokes 1963; Norrander 2000). Wright, Erikson, and Mclvers research (1985) significantly advanced our understanding of the state public opinion and policy linkage by pooling 1976 through 1988 CBS/New York Times polls and disaggregating them to the state level to create reliable, stable, and valid measures of state ideology and partisanship (Erikson, Wright, and Mclver 1993). A host of influential studies employ these measures (e.g., Hill and Hinton-Anderson 1995) to illustrate fundamental linkages between general mass political at? titudes and the general choices of state policy makers. Yet, they represent only a first step in gauging the effects of opinion on state policy. The gen? eral nature of the ideology measure developed by Erikson, Wright, and Mclver leaves open many remaining questions about how specific attitudes may influence specific political outcomes and processes in the states.

Measuring the preferences of state supreme court judges

The premise of this paper is that while the comparative study of courts can address some vitally important questions in judicial politics, these gains will not be secured without a valid and reliable measure of judge preferences that is comparable within and across courts. Party affiliation of judges is a commonly used but weak substitute that suffers from pronounced equivalence problems. We develop a contextually based, party-adjusted surrogate judge ideology measure (PAJID) and subject this measure to an extensive array of validity tests. We also consider the measures stability in predicting judge behavior over the course of the judicial career. As the results illustrate, PAJID offers a valid, stable measure of judge preferences in state supreme courts that is demonstrably superior to party affiliation in analyses of judicial decision-making across areas of law and across 52 state high courts.

Neo-Institutionalism and Dissent in State Supreme Courts

This study applies concepts derived from neo-institutionalism to coalition behavior in state supreme courts, using a pooled cross-sectional time series design. Neo-institutionalism embraces rational choice assumptions about human behavior, with particular attention to how institutional arrangements shape purposive behavior. From this perspective, dissent, or the tendency to form less than unanimous voting coalitions, is viewed not merely as the collective expression of individual attitudes or policy preferences or the result of structural characteristics of institutions but rather as a complex interaction of values and structures. A model incorporating variables derived from the neo-institutional perspective was estimated with GLS-ARMA and compared to an environmental model generated from past research. The amount of variation in dissent rates uniquely accounted for by the neo-institutional model is over six times that of the environmental model, while a composite model can explain more than one-third of the variation in state supreme court dissent rates for 1966, 1973, and 1981. More importantly, however, all the relationships posited by the neo-institutional approach are statistically significant and in the expected direction. An institutional approach guided by rational choice theory offers an important contribution toward developing a more refined understanding of judicial behavior.

Progressive Ambition in the House: A Probabilistic Approach

The effectiveness of elections as instruments of popular control is at a minimum predicated upon the desire of elected officeholders to retain at least their current position. Additionally, a substantial body of research has pointed to the role differential ambition plays in shaping the careers and behavior of officeholders. The following analysis evaluates decisions by members of the U.S. House of Representatives either to seek reelection or to pursue higher office. Probit analysis is employed to disentangle the relative influence of factors contributing to decisions to seek higher office. This method also allows for the estimation of the influence of each of these factors in terms of how they contribute to the probability a member would seek higher office. Among the influences evaluated, factors conditioning the nature of the opportunity for higher office emerge as the more salient determinants of decisions to pursue that office. It is believed that this technique holds promise for future inquiries into the role ambition plays in the roll call and electoral activities of House members.

The Structure of Presidential Approval: Constraints within and across Presidencies

If approval polls are as important as they seem to be to presidents and president-watchers, they can tell us more about common constraints across administrations. While an extensive body of research has examined these polls, we know little about the dimensions of approval generally. Based on a priori expectations derived from the institutional literature, we propose a general model that partitions approval into mutually exclusive and exhaustive components: time, circumstances, and administration. This model is applied to pooled monthly observations from the administrations of Truman through Reagan. All three components are statistically significant and together account for most of the variation in approval. We find a time curve, common to all presidents, consisting of a cycle of deflation and partial restoration of approval. From month seven on, presidents suffer a statistically significant loss of support month by month until the erosion subsides when the next election approaches. This temporal dimension, we find, also structures specific presidential activities across the term. We also find significant effects for categories of circumstances holding across all presidencies. Economic conditions and some dramatic events exerted significant effects on approval. Finally, with time and circumstances controlled, we find that a significant amount of variation in approval still exists within each administration. The results of this analysis resolve many of the conflicts in the literature and point the way to a convergence about common constraints on approval. The results also tell us more about the presidential office. They indicate that while the relationship between each administration and the public is distinctive, all of these presidents operated within the same important and significant restraints.

Presidential Activities from Truman through Reagan: Timing and Impact

President watchers worry that the office has become dominated by public relations goals. This notion of a public relations presidency implies that presidents act in deliberate ways to achieve heightened popularity in the polls and in elections. We develop and evaluate a model of presidential activity using data from postwar administrations Truman through Reagan. We also examine the impact of these activities on monthly Gallup approval ratings. There is some evidence that presidents act strategically and reactively in selecting their activities. However, some acts have more impact than others, some help, some hurt, and some make no difference at all.

The State of State Politics Research

Reviewers of the state of state politics research often lament the fields lack of theoretical progress and its fragmented character These conditions per sist yet a review of this research published in the professions top journals over the past decade reveals a substantively rich and often methodologi cally sophisticated body of scholarship. Applying an inclusive approach, this essay examines all research published on state politics over the last decade in the professions six top journals: APSR, AJPS, JOP, PRQ Polity and SSQ. Trends in substantive focus and the findings of this research are described, as are methodological approaches and innovations. The study takes stock of the progress the field has made and identifies promising avenues for future inquiry. The subfield could advance by emphasizing its unique comparative analytical advantages. These advantages provide an excellent opportunity to evaluate the impact of institutional and environ mental contexts on political behavior, processes and outcomes. The field needs to emphasize the importance of modeling political behavior across contexts, and interactively across contextual and individual levels of analy sis. By so doing, the subfield can show how states matter and also assess the generality of models that focus too often on behavior or process within single contexts.

Does State Political Ideology Change over Time

Students of politics in the American states agree that political ideology varies significantly between the states. Due to the path-breaking work of Wright, Erikson and McIver (1985) and their subsequent research, there is consensus that interstate differences in public ideology are important in accounting for notable differences among the states in the policies they adopt. Despite this consensus, however, there remains a fundamental debate among state politics researchers regarding whether public ideology changes within the states in the post-WW II era. Erikson, Wright, and McIver (1993) contend that state-level ideology is mostly stable, with over-time variations representing “noise.” Alternatively, Berry, Ringquist, Fording, and Hanson (1998) argue that meaningful ideological change occurs within states over time. We test the hypothesis that ideology is stable at the state level. In addition to using the data developed by these teams of researchers, we construct an alternative data set to provide an out-of-sample test of their conflicting expectations. The results have significant implications for the study of state political processes. Systematic analysis underscores the stability and relative dominance of between-state differences indicating that the effects of ideology commonly observed in many state policy studies are due to interstate variation rather than temporal change. However, we also find note-worthy longitudinal ideological variation within selected states during the last three decades. Scholars interested in studying the causes and consequences of state-level political ideology—particularly their implications for public policy adoption and change—might profitably focus on the handful of states where survey-based measures indicate the presence of ideological change.

The Changing Context of State Political Economy

Increasingly, attention has turned to state governments and their economies. This new field of inquiry has been plagued by a paradox. Specifically, while many observers describe heightened economic activism among the states, there is a paucity of evidence indicating that such activity makes any difference. This study presents a simple model of state political economy and examines it in three periods: 1968-1973, 1974-1979, and 1980-1985. Using pooled cross sectional time-series analysis it is found that states have become more autonomous economic domains over the course of these periods and, as they have, state level political attributes have come to play an increasing role in shaping growth in per capita personal income.

Placing State Supreme Courts in State Politics

This essay places state supreme courts in state politics by tracking some of the major lines of research on these important institutions, documenting the importance of state supreme courts, and illustrating important variations among state supreme courts on a host of factors, including docket composition, the exercise of judicial review, litigant patterns, and turnover rates. Through analyses of original data on separation-of-powers relationships in the abortion controversy, it also provides a brief empirical demonstration of how courts influence and are influenced by the political and policy processes operating in the states, and how comparative research helps resolve fundamental controversies in political science. We conclude that there is a remarkable and unfortunate asymmetry between the political importance of state supreme courts and the attention given to them by the research community. Moreover, by capitalizing on the analytical advantages of comparative state judicial politics scholarship, scholars will be able to solve some of the most complex puzzles in the study of state politics.