William D. Berry

Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the American States, 1960-93

We construct dynamic measures of the ideology of a states citizens and political leaders, using the roll call voting scores of state congressional delegations, the outcomes of congressional elections, the partisan division of state legislatures, the party of the governor, and various assumptions regarding voters and state political elites. We establish the utility of our indicators for 1960-93 by (i) examining and, whenever possible, testing the assumptions on which they are based, (ii) assessing their reliability, (iii) assessing their convergent validity by correlating them with other ideology indicators, and (iv) appraising their construct validity by analyzing their predictive power within multivariate models from some of the best recent research in the state politics field. Strongly supportive results from each battery of tests indicate the validity of our annual, state-level measures of citizen and government ideology. Substantively, our measures reveal more temporal variation in state citizen ideology than is generally recognized.

State Lottery Adoptions as Policy Innovations: An Event History Analysis

Two types of explanations of state government innovation have been proposed: internal determinants models (which posit that the factors causing a state government to innovate are political, economic, and social characteristics of a state) and regional diffusion models (which point toward the role of policy adoptions by neighboring states in prompting a state to adopt). We show that the two are conceptually compatible, relying on Mohrs theory of organizational innovation. Then we develop and test a unified explanation of state lottery adoptions reflecting both internal and regional influences. The empirical results provide a great degree of support for Mohrs theory. For the empirical analysis, we rely on event history analysis, a form of pooled cross-sectional time series analysis, which we believe may be useful in a wide variety of subfields of political science. Event history analysis may be able to explain important forms of political behavior (by individuals, organizations, or governments) even if they occur only rarely.

Tax Innovation in the States: Capitalizing on Political Opportunity

This paper assesses the factors that prompt states to adopt taxes during the twentieth century. We test five explanations of state tax innovation derived from the literature-economic development, fiscal health, election cycle, party control, and regional diffusion-using event history analysis, a pooled cross-sectional time-series technique. While little support is found for the economic development and party control explanations, our empirical results are highly consistent with a political opportunity explanation of state tax adoptions; (1) the presence of a long time until the next election, (2) the existence of a fiscal crisis, and (3) the presence of neighboring states that have previously adopted a tax all create opportunities for politicians to shield themselves from the political costs of supporting a tax increase and are all shown by empirical analysis to increase the probability of a tax adoption. This empirical evidence is consistent across different tax instruments and different periods of analysis throughout the twentieth century.

Improving Tests of Theories Positing Interaction

It is well established that all interactions are symmetric: when the effect of X on Y is conditional on the value of Z, the effect of Z must be conditional on the value of X. Yet the typical practice when testing an interactive theory is to (1) view one variable, Z, as the conditioning variable, (2) offer a hypothesis about how the marginal effect of the other variable, X, is conditional on the value of Z, and (3) construct a marginal effect plot for X to test the theory. We show that the failure to make additional predictions about how the effect of Z varies with the value of X, and to evaluate them with a second marginal effect plot, means that scholars often ignore evidence that can be extremely valuable for testing their theory. As a result, they either understate or, more worryingly, overstate the support for their theories.

Legislative Professionalism and Incumbent Reelection: The Development of Institutional Boundaries

It is well established that legislators from highly professionalized bodies are more likely to win reelection than members of less professionalized legislatures. We find that the effect of professionalization on incumbent electoral success is far more pervasive. As the level of professionalism of a legislature increases, the effects of external political and economic forces (such as coattails from higher level elections and national economic conditions) on a legislators chances for reelection diminish in strength. This implies that legislative professionalization promotes institutionalization by establishing boundaries that insulate members from external shocks. We reach these conclusions by specifying and testing a district-level model of state legislative election outcomes, using as dependent variable the probability that an incumbent will win reelection. The model is estimated with probit using data for more than 42,000 state legislators from 1970 to 1989.

Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the U.S. States: A Re-appraisal:

Berry et al.s (1998) measures of U.S. state citizen and government ideology rely on unadjusted interest-group ratings for a states members of Congress to infer information about (1) the ideological orientation of the electorates that selected them or (2) state legislators and the governor from the same state. Potential weaknesses in unadjusted interest-group ratings prompt the question: Are the Berry et al. measures flawed, and if so, can they be fixed by substituting alternative measures of a members ideology? We conclude that a version of the Berry et al. state government ideology indicator relying on NOMINATE common space scores is marginally superior to the extant version. In contrast, we reaffirm the validity of the original state citizen ideology indicator and find that versions based on NOMINATE common space scores and adjusted ADA and COPE scores introduced by Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder (1999) are weaker.

An Annual Cost of Living Index for the American States, 1960-1995

An enormous amount of research on state politics and policy relies on monetary variables. Such variables are affected by differences in the purchasing power of a dollar over time and across states, but a lack of information about geographic variation in the costs of goods and services has kept social scientists from taking these differences into account. We remove this obstacle by constructing an annual cost of living index for each continental American state from 1960 to 1995. The index constitutes a deflator suitable for cross-sectional, time-series, and pooled research. After establishing the reliability and validity of our index using a battery of diagnostic tests, we illustrate the importance of deflating monetary variables by examining two variables that are often used in state politics research.

The Growth of Government in the United States: An Empirical Assessment of Competing Explanations*

Many studies have pointed to a common post-World War II trend in the scope of government activity among Western industrialized nations: government spending as a percentage of total national output has increased substantially during this period. Numerous explanations of this phenomenon have been suggested; however, they have not been tested or have been tested inappropriately. To resolve this problem, we extract nine explanations from the literature and test them by econometric analysis of U.S. government expenditures from 1948 to 1979. Through these tests, we hope to provide a fair way to evaluate simple explanations of government growth using the same level of analysis, the same period of analysis, and the same estimation procedures. Surprisingly, little support is found for any of the extant explanations of government growth. The empirical findings are incorporated into a discussion on how to theoretically specify a more complex and conceptually satisfying model of government growth.

The Measurement and Stability of State Citizen Ideology

Does state political ideology change over time? Brace et al. (2004, 537) say no, based on their analysis of three longitudinal measures of state citizen ideology: Berry et al.s (1998) indicator that relies on election results and congressional roll call votes, and two indicators that Brace et al. construct from ideological self-placement items, one using GSS and ANES survey results, and the other employing surveys conducted by CBS/New York Times. The authors imply that the ideological stability they detect precludes the possibility that state citizen ideology influences state policy. However, this implication stems from Brace et al.s definition of meaningful ideological change as differences in the relative ideology of states over time rather than absolute changes in ideology within states. We contend that this argument is both logically and methodologically flawed. Brace et al. maintain that their CBS/New York Times and GSS/ANES indicators are valid measures of state citizen ideology, but that the Berry et al. indicator is not. To assess this claim, it is crucial to distinguish between ideological self-identification (or symbolic ideology) and policy mood (or operational ideology). We find that the Berry et al. measure is a valid indicator of policy mood, but that it is invalid as a measure of self-identification. In contrast, the CBS/New York Times and GSS/ANES measures are invalid as indicators of policy mood, and while they are valid indicators of self-identified ideology, they are highly unreliable. Although a measure of self-identified ideology can be useful for answering some research questions, we contend that an indicator of policy mood is more appropriate when studying the impact of public opinion on public policy, and we reiterate our confidence in using the Berry et al. (1998) measure for that purpose.

A Strategic Theory of Policy Diffusion via Intergovernmental Competition

Scholars have hypothesized that policy choices by national, state, and local governments often have implications for “location choices” made by residents (e.g., tax policies affect where firms set up business, welfare benefits influence where the poor live, government restaurant smoking restrictions influence where people eat). We develop a spatially explicit strategic theory of policy diffusion driven by intergovernmental competition over residents’ location choices. The theory assumes that governments’ decisions constitute a strategic game in which governments are influenced by their neighbors. We suggest a variety of policy contexts in which the theory is applicable. For one such context—the adoption of lotteries by American states—we use the theory to generate several hypotheses and then test them using event history analysis. The results provide substantial support for the theory and indicate that states compete for lottery business in a much more sophisticated fashion than has been previously recogn...