This dissertation seeks to answer two questions. First, how do national-level conditions associated with the president's party, the presidential election cycle, and presidential approval influence state legislative and gubernatorial elections? Second, how does variation in state government power mediate how state elections are influenced by those national factors? I approach the first question by testing existing theories that help to explain how party voting is affected by the presidential election cycle. Specifically, I examine the effect of presidential coattails, surge and decline theory, national referendum voting theory and vertical policy balancing theory. Surge and decline and referendum theories have been applied to state elections; however, vertical policy balancing has not. In order to assess the independent effects of each of these theories, I include variables for all theories in comprehensive statistical models. These models cover gubernatorial elections from 1948-2010 and state legislative elections from 1968-2010. Using these models, I deconstruct how each of these three theories contributes to the phenomenon of midterm loss in state elections. I find evidence for surge and decline, referendum voting, and electoral balancing in both gubernatorial and state legislative elections. Having established the effects of theories of midterm loss in state elections, I then turn to the question of whether variation in state government power mediates midterm loss. I find that formal institutional power and the size of state government do not systematically affect midterm loss. However, I show that there are important differences between states with and without the direct initiative. I show that coattail effects and referendum voting are lessened in states with the direct initiative and that presidential punishment is increased. These results, along with the findings associated with theories of midterm decline, add to our understanding of elections in the American states as well as the American electoral process in general. / Political Science

Many scholars believe in order to have democratic legitimacy, females should be represented in governing bodies at all levels. Significant literature on female descriptive representation in the U.S. for women’s policy responsiveness confirms the importance between the percentage of females in the legislature and public policy that represents women’s interests. At the same time, there is research suggesting female representatives do not always represent women’s interests. This study examined female descriptive representation and incorporation and its effect on substantive representation of female group salient issues and answered the following research question: Does an increase in female descriptive representation, institutional mechanisms of influence, or other political conditional factors lead to better substantive representation of female group salient issues? This research project replicated Robert Preuhs’ 2006 work by studying the conditional effects of female descriptive representation in the state legislature from 1983-2002. The study is important because it turns to state level data and accounts for all mechanisms of influence, as well as conditional effects of a liberal governing coalition, to determine whether female descriptive representation exerts policy influence. Five theoretical models were presented and tested in this work: The Presence Model, the Simple Incorporation Model, the Specific Institutional Incorporation Model, The Broad Institutional Incorporation Model, and The Party as a Substantive Representative Model. The dependent variables selected were per pupil educational expenditures, percentage of children without health insurance, welfare benefits, and percentage of child support collected. An OLS model with a lagged dependent variable and panel correlated standard errors was used to estimate the coefficients for each dependent variable. Female descriptive representation and incorporation did have some influence on substantive representation with welfare benefits and percentage of child support collected. The female influence is important and increasing the number of females in the legislature will result in more policy and benefits for issues important to women in society. However, examining the issues in a different way or with different dependent variables may provide better results indicating the importance of female descriptive representation on substantive representation of female group salient issues.

This dissertation creates a typology of conflict of interest laws, rules and policies implemented and practiced in all 50 state legislatures. The research identifies characteristics of conflict of interest regimes and suggests relationships between these characteristics and public corruption. If finds that the political culture of a state, and the professionalism of the legislature, influence the definition of what constitutes a legislative conflict of interest, thereby sanctioning some conflict of interest regimes to engage in greater self profit of its members than other regimes.

What does current campus carry policy in the south look like and how has it developed though the state legislatures? Eleven out of fifty states now allow some form of campus carry and the amount of legislation introduced in states across the country is growing each year. This thesis examines the language of attempts to pass campus carry legislation at the state level throughout the south. I examine the evolution of policy language in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas and what current campus carry policy in each state looks like. The conclusions of this examination point to a moderation in policy as it passes through the legislative process, even in Republican dominated state legislatures.

State legislative campaign finance reform varies considerably among states and over time. Over the past 35 years states have adopted increasingly stronger reform policies; however, many disparities between states still exist. Current state legislative campaign finance laws range from disclosure only to clean elections programs. All states have disclosure laws, while only three have clean elections regulations. Many studies of state campaign finance reform examine the regulatory effects on campaigns and elections (e.g., Thompson and Moncrief 1998; Francia and Herrnson 2003) but none consider the causes of such reforms. This dissertation employs a unique research strategy by individually analyzing the specific types of state legislative campaign finance reform: 1) disclosure, 2) contribution limits, and 3) expenditure limits and public funding from 1970-2005. What emerges from these analyses indicates the conditions under which states have adopted more and less stringent types of legislative campaign finance reform. It examines the extent to which legislative professionalism, Democratic control of government, political scandals, and the initiative affect the stringency of campaign finance reform in the states. Just because a state requires legislative candidates to disclose campaign finance figures does not mean that the requirement is strong when compared to what other states are doing. Measuring the type of campaign finance reform based on a unique stringency scale allows us to understand the conditions under which a state supports strong or weak campaign finance laws. / Political Science

There is a great deal of work on campaign finance at the national level, however, state level research is sparse. My dissertation fills this void in the literature by examining the motivations of contributors to state legislators. The literature discusses two major motivations of contributors universalistic contributors, who hope to influence election outcomes, and particularistic contributors who hope to influence legislative votes. The primary hypothesis is that proximity to the general election is the primary factor in explaining contribution patterns in state legislatures; however, proximity to a legislative vote of interest to the contributor will also be significant in explaining contribution patterns. Additionally, the dissertation examines the impact of session limits on contribution patterns. I use campaign contribution data collected by the National Institute on Money in State Politics and select twenty-five bills in nine states to test the primary hypothesis. I use a contributor fixed effects model to test for increased or decreased levels of contributions for each contributor, given the proximity to the election and legislative votes important to the contributor. The results indicate that contributions increase across all states in the two months prior to the general and primary elections, and that proximity to the election is the most important factor in explaining campaign contributions in state legislatures. In 32% of all cases in the study, there was direct evidence of interest groups attempting to influence the outcome of legislative votes. Additionally, an increase in contributions close to a major legislative vote occurred in 77% of the cases without session limits, indicating that interest groups are highly active in attempting to influence policy outcomes. An additional examination of contribution patterns indicates that PACs shift their contributions to the beginning of the legislative session when faced with session limits. My research contributes to our understanding of the motives of campaign contributors and their actions when faced with legal restrictions on their contributions. This research, therefore, allows campaign finance reformers to make better reform decisions.

This dissertation seeks to explain variation in legislative strategies to control policymaking across institutional contexts. Of these many strategies, I focus particularly on the use of statutory language meant to direct agency action and on the use of oversight hearings. I argue that while low levels of oversight activity need not imply that a legislature is helplessly abdicating policymaking responsibility to unelected agencies, this may be the case in some circumstances. With the goal of establishing when the lack of oversight may mean such normatively problematic abdication, I develop a signaling model of delegation and oversight which proposes that oversight depends on institutional features (such as legislative capacity, the existence of legislative term limits and a legislative veto), political features (such as policy conflict within the government and within the legislature and the policy preferences and activism of important judicial actors), and the legislature's initial delegation of policymaking discretion to an agency. Critically, the pursuit of either strategy depends on alternative strategies available as well as on the likely actions of other institutions with the power to affect policy outcomes. The dissertation extends our theoretical understanding of legislative-executive relations and provides one of the first large-scale empirical analyses of legislative policymaking. In the first empirical chapter of this dissertation, I assess the predictions of the theory concerning congressional oversight activity from 1947-2006. I find that both the extent to which a congressional committee's ideology diverges from an agency's and the policy-specific expertise of said committee affect the number of oversight hearing days the committee holds, but only when policy disagreements are sufficiently conflictual. This last condition suggests, contrary to previous research, that the extent to which oversight should be necessary, to either legislative policymaking or democratic legitimacy, varies across preference arrangements. In the next empirical chapter, I switch my focus from the analysis of a single legislature over time to a cross-sectional study of the extent to which U.S. state legislatures delegate authority to bureaucratic agencies. Here, I find that the amount of discretion that a legislature delegates to an agency charged with implementing Medicaid policy is nonlinearly related to the extent to which state courts are likely to affect policy outcomes, as captured by a new measure of judicial activism. These analyses confirm that legislatures consider alternative methods of control as well as the likely actions of external institutions when crafting their policymaking strategies.

Over the past twenty years, the geographical bases of state legislative parties have shifted substantially. In statehouses across the country, legislators from densely-populated districts with large racial minority populations have become a larger presence inside Democratic caucuses while legislators from exurban and sparsely-populated districts have become a larger presence inside Republican caucuses. These changes have had important consequences for roll-call voting and policy outcomes inside legislatures, as new coalitional configurations formed by the intersection of party and geography have replaced older ones. In this dissertation, I examine the causes and consequences of these changes in a new way, one that more closely approximates a legislator's relationship to her "geographical constituency" (to use Richard Fenno's famous term). Unlike traditional studies of the social origins of legislative conflict, which have focused on how the constituency bases of legislative parties can be distinguished by reference to a small set of district-level demographic variables examined independently of each other, my approach views district demographic variables as the empirical manifestations of a wide variety of distinct, if latent, geographical contexts. My efforts to model the geographical constituency are centered upon a technique called Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), which estimates a latent categorical variable (in this case, legislative district categories indicative of distinct socioeconomic contexts) that captures covariation among a set of observed continuous variables (in this case, district-level demographic and geographical variables). The LPA analysis, which incorporates over 3,500 districts from seventeen chambers in the 1990s and 2000s, yields a nine-fold district categorization scheme that serves as the basis for subsequent inquiries of the dissertation. These inquiries examine how demographic and electoral change have interacted to influence trends in partisan representation of the district categories, how party and district category come together to explain patterns of roll-call ideology among state legislators, and how social cleavages over public policy within state electorates are translated into particular voting alignments involving the district categories. The dissertation speaks to a large literature in political science on the constituency-legislator relationship, as well to current debates about geographical sorting, legislative polarization, and the role of policy content in shaping voting coalitions. / text

<p>  </p> <p>How did the issue of child marriage go from relative obscurity in the United States to occupy a prominent place on the agendas of the majority of state legislatures in the span of a few years? The marriage of minors is internationally recognized as a human rights abuse – yet, until recently, it has remained legal under state law. This issue has just in the last six years ascended to legislative agendas even without public attention or the backing of powerful lobbying groups. I argue that social movements were integral in heightening legislative attention to this low salience issue. The movement to end child marriage engaged in both outsider tactics like theatrical public protests and insider tactics like testifying in committee to engage legislators on this issue. Communications from social movement organizations framed underage marriage around survivor experiences and child protection. I complete two case studies of efforts to ban underage marriage in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Pennsylvania became the third state to ban child marriage in 2020 while Massachusetts could not get a vote in both houses on marriage age reform. Evidence in this study includes analysis of traditional and social media campaigns and other archival materials as well as in-depth interviews with social movement actors and legislators. I also conduct a 50-state statistical analysis of those factors relevant to agenda setting and policy adoption on marriage age reforms. In case studies, I find social movement actors caught the interest of legislators even amongst an ambivalent public through their framing of child marriage and the centrality of child marriage survivors to their advocacy. I find a low salience issue like marriage age reform is less likely to reach policy adoption when those frames conflict with more salient issues like abortion. My findings in the longitudinal 50-state study support my hypotheses on the centrality of social movement actors at both the agenda setting and policy adoption phases. The existence of outsider tactics and online campaigns were both positively and statistically significantly related to a higher likelihood of agenda setting on marriage age reforms. In the policy adoption phase, the use of insider tactics is positively and statistically significantly related to a higher likelihood of adoption. This project increases our understanding of how social movements can drive policy change even in the absence of public attention through direct appeals to legislators. </p>

<p>My dissertation is an exploratory study examining the power dynamics that Black women lawmakers navigate in Georgia General Assembly. My project focuses on re-conceptualizing power in legislative studies by centering on the lived experiences of Black women lawmakers. I build on previous work to develop my theory of intersectional resistance. I defined intersectional resistance as individuals with intersectionally marginalizing identities pushing back on behaviors, events, and norms that attempt to marginalize them or their constituents to advance their agenda in the state legislature.</p>