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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 measure's 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.

Do state supreme courts act impartially or are they swayed by public opinion? Do judicial elections influence judge behavior? To date these questions have received little direct attention due to the absence of comparable public opinion data in states and obstacles to collecting data necessary for comprehensive analysis of state supreme court outcomes. Advances in measurement, data archiving, and methodology now allow for consideration of the link between public opinion and judicial outcomes in the American states. The analysis presented considers public opinion's influence on the composition of courts (indirect effects) and its influence on judge votes in capital punishment cases (direct effects). In elective state supreme courts, public support for capital punishment influences the ideological composition of those courts and judge willingness to uphold death sentences. Notably, public support for capital punishment has no measurable effect on nonelective state supreme courts. On the highly salient issue of the death penalty, mass opinion and the institution of electing judges systematically influence court composition and judge behavior.

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Objective. We investigate causal processes linking environmental conditions, attitudes, and policies in the American states: Is public opinion about ecology shaped by environmental conditions? Are state policymakers responsive to environmental opinions? Does public opinion respond to policy adoption? Methods. Using public opinion data from the DDB Worldwide Life Style Survey to measure aggregate state attitudes about the environment, as well as measures of water quality and policy intervention, we capture the dynamics of representation in the American states on the environment during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Results. Our findings support a thermostatic model of representation-state environmental opinions are influenced by environmental conditions and are responsive to policy outputs alongside improved environmental conditions. Conclusions. This model of the opinion-policy linkage refines our understanding of representation and focuses us not just on the passage of public policy to address public desires, but the effectiveness of that policy as well.

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.

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