The power of conference committees is well documented and studied by scholars of the US Congress. But little is known about politics of bicameral agreement within state legislatures. Leveraging variation across states, I explore the conditions under which legislative leaders prefer formal bicameral conference negotiations to informal talks to reach final legislative agreements. Deploying an original dataset of state legislative decisions between 2005 and 2018, I find that ideologically cohesive majority parties favor the use of conferences, disproportionately relying on them to reconcile bicameral differences on salient measures. Majority parties, however, refrain from going to conference in those assemblies that empower the minority party to select its preferred conferees. The interaction of chamber rules and partisan dynamics thus shapes the contours of legislative agreements in systematic ways across the states.

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Can the design of governmental institutions promote timely governance? This article investigates this question by examining the relationship between the design of fiscal institutions and budgetary delays across the fifty states. These budgetary offices are created by lawmakers to advance sound fiscal policy and sustainable public finance. This article argues that the unbiased information provided by nonpartisan budget offices minimize the likelihood of budgetary delay as well as lessen how long budgetary stalemate persists when a delay occurs. The findings suggest that nonpartisan fiscal institutions do not prevent budgetary delay but substantially reduce the duration of budgetary gridlock.

Do governmental institutions constrain state actors? I investigate this question by examining the relationship between the design of state legislative fiscal offices and the health of state budgets. These budgetary bodies serve a supporting role for legislatures, designed to advance sound fiscal policy and sustainable public finance. With an original data set encompassing all state legislative budgetary bodies from 1963-2014, I estimate the causal effects of nonpartisan fiscal offices on budget surpluses with a generalized difference-in-differences estimator. My results show that the presence of these fiscal offices within legislatures do not affect a state’s fiscal well-being. This result holds even when legislative fiscal offices are relatively empowered in the budget process, raising doubts about how state lawmakers use nonpartisan budgetary information in funding the government.

How representative are conference delegations in state legislative chambers? I argue that differing conference rules across state legislative chambers influence majority party control over conference delegations. With an original data set encompassing all state-level conference committees from 2005 to 2016, I compare the observed policy preferences between conference delegation and majority party medians when the majority party unilaterally appoints and when the minority party has influence over conferee selection. My results show that in state legislative chambers where the minority can influence conference appointments, delegations are ideologically biased away from the majority party. These findings underscore how majority parties are limited when minorities have procedural rights.