The Ideological Mapping of American Legislatures

Abstract

T he development and elaboration of the spatial theory of voting has contributed greatly to the study of legislative decision making and elections. Statistical models that estimate the spatial locations of individual decision-makers have made a key contribution to this success. Spatial models have been estimated for the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court, U.S. presidents, a large number of non-U.S. legislatures, and supranational organizations. Yet one potentially fruitful laboratory for testing spatial theories, the individual U.S. states, has remained relatively unexploited, for two reasons. First, state legislative roll call data have not yet been systematically collected for all states over time. Second, because ideal point models are based on latent scales, comparisons of ideal points across states or even between chambers within a state are difficult. This article reports substantial progress on both fronts. First, we have obtained the roll call voting data for all state legislatures from the mid-1990s onward. Second, we exploit a recurring survey of state legislative candidates to allow comparisons across time, chambers, and states as well as with the U.S. Congress. The resulting mapping of America's state legislatures has great potential to address numerous questions not only about state politics and policymaking, but also about legislative politics in general.

Constraints on policy learning: designing the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in Pennsylvania

“…The RGGI case suggests that executive agencies are limited by existing legal authorities in using design elements like coalition building; institutional dismantling; and providing short-term incentives to achieve buy-in from opponents -tools that legislatures have at their disposal for crafting durable policy reforms that lead to positive feedback (May 2005;Patashnik 2008). Executive action increases with political polarization and legislative gridlock (Edward and Matthew 2017), two forces to which states and governors are not immune (Shor and McCarty 2011;Jensen 2017). Much like Patashnik's (2008) call for scholars to pay more attention to what happens after major reform adoption through the legislative process, more attention is needed to what happens after governors act, particularly when there is little hope of legislative legitimation.…”

Has the Top Two Primary Elected More Moderates?

“…Our primary measure is the ideal points developed by Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty. 24 Their method first derives legislature-specific ideal points from roll calls cast by all incumbents in each one. It then derives common space ideal points using the National Political Awareness Test (NPAT), a common issuepreference survey sent to all candidates for state or national office across the country.…”

When Increased Turnout Matters: Simulating the Partisan Impact of Full Turnout in Senate and Gubernatorial Elections

“…Based on the extensive evidence available in the literature on state politics, we expect to find that the effects of turnout are variable at the state level because citizen evaluations of national politicians differ from their evaluations of state politics in two important ways. First, state parties are more sensitive to the median voter in the state than are the national parties (Birkhead 2015;Shor and McCarty 2011). While a Democratic senatorial candidate in a conservative state will be subjected to the pressures of a national party, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate in the same state will be less constrained by national pressures, with more flexibility to adopt the position that best fits the electoral constituency.…”