Does State Political Ideology Change over Time?

Abstract

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.

State Public Opinion, the Death Penalty, and the Practice of Electing Judges

“…It is reasonable to wonder if the results of our analysis of indirect relationships between PAJID (Brace et al 2004) and the Erikson, Wright, and McIver (1993) public opinion measures of ideology were not structurally determined by how the PAJID measure was constructed. We do not believe this is so for the following reasons: (1998,341).…”

Reply to “The Measurement and Stability of State Citizen Ideology”

“…We concur that the Berry et al measure captures something different from the other two measures. 1 In fact, we emphasized this very point in our original treatment of this subject (Brace et al 2004). We also agree that policy mood and ideological self-identification are different conceptual phenomena.…”

How and Why Do Criminal Justice Public Policies Spread Throughout U.S. States? A Critical Review of the Diffusion Literature

“…First, the clear division in operationalization of this variable between those analyses that employed Berry and colleagues' (1998) measure of political ideology and those studies that employed Erikson and colleagues' (1993) measure deserves further examination. A debate about how to best measure political ideology has long existed within political science (Brace et al, 2004), and it might be fruitful for future researchers to consider which of these measures-which both rely on very different sets of data-is more appropriate to measure political ideology in studies in the criminal justice field. At the same time, the results of this review also suggest that future researchers could consider employing other measures related to ideology that are more complex than these raw operationalizations.…”

“…As with geographic proximity, researchers typically operationalized the effect of political ideology in two different ways. Ten analyses (Allen et al, 2004, both truth-in-sentencing policies and hate crime policies; Chamberlain & Haider-Markel, 2005;Grossback et al, 2004;Jacobs & Carmichael, 2002;Mooney & Lee, 2000;Nicholson-Crotty, 2004;Oakley, 2009; operationalized political ideology using at least one of Berry, Ringquist, Fording, and Hanson's (1998) measures that are widely employed in political science research to represent state ideology (Brace, Arceneaux, Johnson, & Ulbig, 2004). These time-varying measures explore the liberalism of each state's government officials and each state's citizens in the late 20th century and early 21st century.…”

“…Nine other analyses (Grattet et al, 1998;Hays, 1996;Mooney & Lee, 2000;Nice, 1992;Soule & Earl, 2001;Williams, 2003, for truth-in-sentencing policies, threestrikes sentencing policies, juvenile transfer policies, and correctional boot camps) used a second popular measure from the political science literature to operationalize political ideology: Erikson, Wright, and McIver's (1993) public opinion-focused measure (Brace et al, 2004;Wright, Erikson, & McIver, 1985). (Mooney & Lee [2000], used Berry and colleagues' [1998] measures in their analysis of the diffusion of laws related to the abolition of the death penalty prior to 1972 and used Erikson and colleagues' [1993] measure in their analysis of the diffusion of laws related to the reinstatement of the death penalty after 1972.)…”