Public Opinion in the U.S. States: 1956 to 2010

Abstract

In this article, we create, validate, and analyze new dynamic measures of state partisanship, state policy mood, and state political ideology. The measures of partisanship and policy mood begin in 1956 and the measure of ideology begins in 1976. Our approach uses the advantages of two leading techniques for measuring state public opinion-multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) and survey aggregation. The resulting estimates are based on nearly 500 different surveys with a total of more than 740,000 respondents. After validating our measures, we show that during the last half century, policy preferences in the states have shifted in important and sometimes surprising ways. For example, we find that differences in political attitudes across time can be as important as differences across states. Keywordsissue preferences, public opinion, voting behavior, political behavior, survey research, methodology, ideology Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State-The title of Gelman et al. 's (2008) important book draws attention to the significance of the states in U.S. politics. This is with good reason. Presidential candidates, after all, first compete in state primaries and again in the general election for the plurality of votes in each state. Senators, of course, also depend on state constituencies. And states obviously matter in more direct ways. State policies dictate education standards, eligibility requirements for social services, business license requirements, sales tax rates, the definition of marriage, and the use of capital punishment.

Judicial Elections, Public Opinion, and Decisions on Lower‐Salience Issues

“…First, we consider that judges may not be responsive to opinion on the environment but, instead, to the general liberalism of the state, which might occur if, for instance, the judges have a sense of the public's overall liberalism but not its environmental preferences. As a measure of state ideology, we employ the Enns and Koch () estimates of state policy mood, which extend through 2010 and are analogous to the national policy mood measure of Erikson et al ().…”

“…The MRP estimates correlate with each of the CCES state‐level estimates and the state‐level polls at ρ = 0.75 . By comparison, the Enns and Koch () measure of state ideological mood is only correlated with the CCES environment opinion estimates at ρ = 0.38, indicating that the MRP estimates capture something more than general state ideology or mood. Finally, it is worth noting that the by‐party estimates of the state polls and MRP estimates both show an ideological trend identified elsewhere, whereby the environment becomes an increasingly partisan issue over time (e.g., Dunlap et al ).…”

The Social Structure of Political Echo Chambers: Variation in Ideological Homophily in Online Networks

“…We also dropped hubs with less than 100 followers, since they were not prominent enough to be properly considered hubs. 4 The validity of using ideological positions of legislators to proxy those of their constituents has been the subject of recent critiques which point out that legislators tend to be more ideologically extreme than members of the general public and that nonideological factors affect electoral outcomes (e.g., Bafumi & Herron 2010;Enns & Koch 2013). However, we note that, while any individual has little control over who represents her in Congress, she can choose whether to follow any legislator on Twitter and can follow any number of legislators.…”

Political Experience and the Success of Female Gubernatorial Candidates

“…The findings support our hypothesis and, in total, suggest that three of the four election specific variables impact the success 4 The Berry et al [42] measure of ideology is only one of those used in the literature. In addition, we estimated the equations using the Enns and Koch [44] and Windett [38] state public opinion and female sociopolitical subculture measures respectively. The results were the same.…”