The Salience of American State Politics

Abstract

Research emphasizing the correlates of state policy outputs and the performance of particular institutions has overshadowed the role of the citizenry in the drama of state politics. One question of basic concern is the relevance of state government and politics for the inhabitants of a state. At the level of public policy and institutional performance the answer to this is factual and straightforward. The nature, amount, distribution, and to some extent the quality of a state's services and policies can be specified. Since states perform most of the traditional functions of governmental units and since these functions affect the fortunes of the citizens, state politics has an obvious, tangible, objective relevance for a state's inhabitants. At another level, however, the answer is not so clear-cut. Here we are dealing with the idea of what is subjectively relevant. Large numbers of people apparently pass their lives being touched by political institutions in a variety of ways without becoming particularly interested in or involved with these institutions. Other people become intensely, purposively related to these same institutions. Still others fall along a continuum between these two poles. If substantial variations exist in the general salience of politics, there is little reason to doubt that the same conditions may be found in particular subsets of political matters. In the case at hand this subset consists of the cluster of institutions, actors, and processes known as state political systems.

Explaining Public Confidence in the Branches of State Government

“…Survey evidence suggests that voters do see meaningful differences in terms of state and federal responsibilities, though these perceived differences less consistently inform decision making (Arceneaux 2004;Schneider and Jacoby 2003). Even if state politics is not the level of government people follow most, it still receives a good share of public attention (Jennings and Zeigler 1970). Comparing confidence across the three state institutions in Table 1, we see that the office of the governor enjoys the highest level of public support, followed by state and community courts, and then state legislatures.…”

Involvement and Political Advertising Effect

“…These were used to determine enduring involvement. Situational involvement was predetermined as per variables discussed earlier and work by Jennings and Ziegler (1970) in which he shows that national elections are high involvement, state elections are low involvement, and local elections are slightly higher than low involvement. The questionnaire also dealt with party loyalty and voting history.…”

The Roots of Citizens' Knowledge of State Politics

“…While people's ability to learn should promote knowledge of all levels of government, we expect that knowledge of state matters will be particularly responsive to the incentives and opportunities to learn about state politics. State politics fails to attract people's interest in the same way as politics at other levels (Jennings and Zeigler 1970). 6 As Dahl (1967) argues, the states are unimportant to citizens-not as proximate as local governments and not as important as the national government.…”