Katz and Sala linked the development of committee property rights in the late-nineteenth-century U.S. House of Representatives to the introduction of the Australian ballot. If, as they posited, members sought personal reputations to carry them to reelection in the new electoral environment, the current article argues that behaviors with more immediate political payoffs also should have changed in ways their theory would predict. The article examines whether committee assignments, floor voting behavior, and the distribution of pork barrel projects changed in predicted ways and finds supportive outcomes, but usually only when the office bloc ballot, and not the party bloc ballot, was in use.
This article sheds new light on policy diffusion by exploring policy complexity in state-level lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) antidiscrimination policies. The multiple component event history approach taken in this research allows for the concurrent study of both policy content and the factors that affect policy adoption. Results reveal that the factors influencing policy adoption vary depending on both the content and scope of the policy in question. In addition to addressing laws that protect gay people from discrimination, this article is one of the first studies in the political science and policy literature to empirically investigate the spread of transgender-inclusive laws. Despite combined advocacy and public conflation of identities, gay and transgender-inclusive laws appear to be influenced by different internal and external factors.
History shows that presidential candidates often win their home states by large margins. This phenomenon, which is sometimes called localism, has attracted the attention of scholars for decades. In this study, we improve upon previous localism research in several significant ways. Most important, we challenge the traditional conceptualization of the home state effect, arguing that a candidate's national showing is best thought of as a determinant of the effect instead of part of it, as has often been the case. We also devise three other new hypotheses to account for variation in the home state effect. All of these hypotheses find support in our empirical analyses, providing the most complete understanding of the home state effect to date.
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