The Strength of Civil Society Ties: Explaining Party Change in America’s Bluest State

Leveraging the insights of depth: A staged strategy for building qualitative case studies of American state‐level policy

“…For example, using qualitative analysis of states’ enactment of “right‐to‐work” laws, Hertel‐Fernandez (2018) developed the concept of “policy feedback as a political weapon” where political strategists advocate for policies that will weaken their opponents. Lotesta's (2017) qualitative case study that includes Capitol Television footage, archival, and interview research allows her to develop a new theory of party change based on parties’ ties to civil society organizations. Likewise, state‐level cases can also help researchers identify and establish potential limits to generalized theoretical propositions by tracing complex interactions within state contexts.…”

“…A handful of recent qualitative studies on state policy making have generated important insights (e.g., Basseches 2023; Lotesta 2017; Merriman and Pacewicz 2022; Schoenfeld and Campbell 2023; Stokes 2020), but they represent only a slice of the enormous range of policies worthy of studying across 50 states. We need a much larger body of qualitative case study research to develop theories about state politics and policy outcomes to explain complex formal and informal policy processes, and to grasp the nuanced implications of substantive policy content.…”

Reputation as Articulation: Alliance Building of Career Politicians in the Jim Crow South

“…Recent research has extended this latter position, identifying scope conditions on the constitutive power of political parties (Riley 2015; Eidlin 2016) and drawing attention to third-party actors in mediating party, society, and the state (Lotesta 2016; Mudge 2018). We are sympathetic to these efforts, yet even this research that highlights individual actors such as policy professionals and intellectuals as central to the political articulation overlooks the articulating role of politicians.…”