State-level research affords scholars a unique opportunity to study legislative behavior because state legislators are accessible in ways that members of congress are not. State legislators' willingness to respond to interviews and questionnaires has provided scholars with a rich array of data about their behavior and perceptions. This survey research has contributed greatly to our theoretical and practical knowledge of legislative behavior and institutions. We examine 73 articles published in top academic journals from 1975 to 2000 to identify common techniques of surveying state legislators and suggest ways in which scholars can enhance the prospects for collecting high quality data. We also consider what type of collective efforts could be undertaken to enhance this underutilized resource for studying legislative politics.Twenty years ago, Malcolm Jewell argued that, as a discipline, "we have given too little thought and devoted too little of our research resources to the field of state government and politics" (1981, 638). We echo his view but with a special focus-the study of state legislators and their institutions through survey methods. 1 State legislators are accessible in ways that members of congress are not, and their willingness to respond to interviews and questionnaires has provided scholars with a rich data source. Since 1975, more than 70 articles based on surveys or interviews of state legislators have been published in top political science journals. 2 These studies show that survey research has contributed greatly to our theoretical and practical knowledge of legislative behavior and institutions. The use of survey techniques to study state legislators can and should be expanded. The 50 state legislatures have more than 7,600 members, representing great cross-sectional variation in individuals and institutions whose potential for testing important hypotheses of political behavior is largely untapped. The sheer size of the potential response pool could increase the power of statistical models and help us untangle the subtle personal, electoral, and institutional effects that at NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY on June 17, 2015 spa.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Risk perceptions are important to the policy process because they inform individuals' preferences for government management of hazards that affect personal safety, public health, or ecological conditions. Studies of risk in the policy process have often focused on explicating the determinants of risk perceptions for highly salient, high consequence hazards (e.g., nuclear energy). We argue that it is useful to also study more routinely experienced hazards; doing so shows the relevance of risk perceptions in individuals' daily lives. Our investigation focuses on the impact perceived risk has on citizens' preferences over hazard management policies (as distinct from identifying risk perception determinants per se). We use a recursive structural equation model to analyze public opinion data measuring attitudes in three distinct issue domains: air pollution, crime, and hazardous waste storage and disposal. We find that citizens utilize perceived risk rationally: greater perceived risk generally produces support for more proactive government to manage potential hazards. This perceived risk-policy response relationship generally holds even though the policy options respondents were asked to consider entailed nontrivial costs to the public. The exception seems to be when individuals know less about the substantive issue domain.
Some measure of equality is necessary for deliberative democracy to work well, yet empirical scholarship consistently points to the deleterious effect that hierarchy and inequalities of epistemological authority have on deliberation. This article tests whether real-world deliberative forums can overcome these challenges. Contrary to skeptics, it concludes that the act of deliberation itself and the presence of trained moderators ameliorate inequalities of epistemological authority, thus rendering deliberative democracy possible, even within hierarchical organizations.
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