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

State legislatures have variable levels of professionalism. Measures of state legislative professionalism typically include metrics such as the number of legislative staff, legislative session length, and legislator compensation. This research considers the influence of variability in levels of legislative professionalism on the state’s oversight process. Few prior studies engage the legislative oversight process in states. To fill this gap, this research takes a grounded theory approach that uses thirty-three interviews with legislators, legislative staff, committee staff, and legislative research organizations in five states to test existing concepts and to develop new directions for research. The current scholarship on oversight and legislative institutions emphasizes the importance of broad factors like elections and committees, as well as more specific concepts like inter-branch conflict, partisanship, and legislative term-limits. This research confirms and extends those ideas, reaching the conclusion that oversight in states is a deeply political action. A central contribution of this work is a consideration of how the oversight process in states operates on the ground. The interviews uncover that many measures of professionalism often perform in unforeseen ways than what might expected. For instance, a lengthy legislative session can prohibit oversight actors from performing oversight functions. Conversely, long legislative interim periods provide actors with the space to conduct meaningful reviews of administrative action. This research also advances understandings of state legislative research organizations – like the Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission and Texas Sunset Commission – which play a vital role in performing meaningful legislative oversight. To catalyze these ideas a new concept, the oversight entrepreneur, is used to describe how stakeholders use the oversight process to achieve their preferences and enhance their reputations. The interviews contained here also expose the importance of each state’s individual context – including Constitutional, institutional, normed and historical factors. The dissimilarities that play out across states (and their secondary effects) demonstrate that future scholars would be well served to adopt caution in the application of concepts across contexts. / Ph. D. / This dissertation examines the legislative oversight process through first-person interviews with members of state legislatures and their staffs. I am primarily interested in understanding how differences in legislatures influence oversight processes. Specifically, this considers how variation in state legislatures – such as the amount of full time staff or the length of legislative session – change the level of attention and how actors perform oversight. Legislative oversight is typically defined as legislative review of administrative/executive actions – such as committee hearings and personal contact with executive actors. State legislative oversight research is an area of limited prior scholarship. The findings of this research demonstrate that legislative oversight is a low priority of legislative actors. Consequently, the rationale for and practice of legislative oversight is largely based on the context within the specific state. Individual legislators often take action in the realm of oversight solely for their own motivations or because of their distinctive expertise, a phenomenon that I term oversight entrepreneurs. Finally, this research demonstrates that future scholars would benefit from more research that explores how differences across state legislatures play out in other aspects of the legislative branch and its operations.

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

abstract: Women have played a vital role in Nevada's lawmaking process since first lobbying the Territorial Legislature in 1861. In subsequent decades, women increased in numbers as lobbyists, staff, and reporters. By 1914, when Nevada women won the right to vote and be elected to office, male legislators were accustomed to a female presence in the Capitol. With enfranchisement, however, came a more direct role for women in the state's lawmaking process. Featuring the twenty-nine women who served in the Nevada Legislature in the first half of the twentieth century, this dissertation enhances knowledge about public women between what are commonly called the two feminist waves. In addition to a general analysis of their partisan and legislative activities, this dissertation specifically contemplates women's participation in shifting Nevada's tax base from residents to nonresidents. This dissertation argues that these women legislators were influenced primarily by their experiences in the business sector. Suffrage provided the opportunity to hold public office, but it did not define their politics. More useful for understanding women lawmakers in the first half of the twentieth century is what I call "fiscal maternalism." Women legislators mitigated their social concerns with their understanding of the state's economic limitations. Their votes on controversial issues such as legalized gambling, easy divorce, and regulated prostitution reflected a perspective of these issues as economic first and moral second. Demonstrating a motherly care for the state's economy and the tax burden on families, women invoked both their maternal authority and financial acumen to construct their legislative authority. Combining policy history and women's history, this dissertation documents that a legislator's sex did not necessarily predict her vote on legislation and advances the gendered analysis of state lawmaking beyond the dichotomy that emerges with the application of the label "women's issues." In addition, this dissertation demonstrates that the digitization of newspapers provides a fruitful new resource for historians, particularly those interested in women. The ability to search within articles removes the reliance on headlines and reveals that the previously-disregarded society pages are valuable tools for tracing women's business activities and political networks. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. History 2011

<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>

Each of the fifty U.S. state constitutions establishes a fundamental framework for governmental operations within the state. Described by previous scholarship as the state's political technology, state constitutions delineate formal gubernatorial and legislative authority. Extant literature has focused on gubernatorial and legislative relations from the standpoint of the contemporary contextual political factors associated with individuals serving in the respective offices. Although useful, this focus limits a deeper understanding about how state constitutions, as a point of departure, might affect the way in which governors and legislators interact in the policy process. Specifically examined by this research is how variation in design might impact the ability of governors and state legislatures to achieve preferred policy alternatives. This is addressed through the divergence between the governor's proposed budget and the state legislature's enacted budget. To analyze potential influences of this divergence, state budgets from 27 U.S. states over a recent period of eleven years were collected and coded according to policy areas. Data were used to test hypothesized effects of state constitutional design of formal authority. Based on Tobit model estimation and predicted values of divergence derived from alternative constitutional design scenarios, some state constitutional factors affect the ability of governors and state legislatures to achieve preferred policy alternatives. Salient constitutional variables include gubernatorial and legislative budget authority, institutional control, and duration in service factors. The empirical focus of this research contributes to a more enriched understanding of state constitutions as political technologies. In essence, the design of state constitutional authority has the potential to affect how governors and state legislatures interact in the policy process. In addition to contributing to state constitutional theory, these findings enrich the understanding of the design of authority by reformers and citizens. / Ph. D.