Despite increasing popular and media attention to the preemption of local policymaking by state governments, the empirical political science literature on preemption remains relatively scarce. After first identifying and discussing state preemption laws across twenty-one diverse public policies, we investigate how political, institutional, and demographic factors predict the implementation of these laws. Our empirical analysis reveals that states where Republicans control both legislative chambers and the governorship, with more politically conservative citizens, a higher percentage of African Americans, and a stronger conservative interest group presence passes more laws that preempt local policymaking. Our results demonstrate that state preemption efforts are more closely associated with political and demographic factors and less associated with institutional forces.

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American state politics scholars have generally relied on Ranney's measure of the partisan composition of state legislatures and governors' offices to evaluate competition between parties for control of state government, and Holbrook and Van Dunk's measure of the competitiveness of individual state legislative elections to evaluate the degree of electoral competition in a state. Both measure "competition" and were previously correlated with one another, so researchers might be tempted to consider them two measures of the same concept. This would be mistaken, however, because they are measuring two distinct concepts. We use new data on state legislative partisan balance and election returns to compute (and make publicly available) the two measures of competition from 1970 to 2003, a time span that is significantly longer than any previous study. We show that the relationship between the two measures has drastically changed over the last 30 years. Although the two measures were positively correlated in the 1970s and 1980s, they are now (as we might expect, given they are different concepts) negatively correlated. We investigate one possible explanation for this change and conclude by discussing a set of practical recommendations for scholars who plan to incorporate a measure of competition in future studies.

While a voluminous literature examines the effects of organized labor on workers’ wage and benefit levels in the United States, there has been little investigation into whether membership in a labor union directly contributes to a higher quality of life. In this paper, we uncover evidence that union members are more satisfied with their lives than those who are not members and that the substantive effect of union membership on life satisfaction rivals other common predictors of quality of life. Moreover, we find that union membership boosts life satisfaction across demographic groups regardless if someone is rich or poor, male or female, or young or old. These results suggest that organized labor in the United States can have significant implications for the quality of life that citizens experience.

Renewed emphasis on the group-based nature of political parties makes understanding the relationship between partisan and group identities essential. How do citizens respond to the internal disconnect between their partisan identity and their other politically salient identities? In addition, do differences in the group-based nature of each party lead to asymmetric effects of party–group ambivalence? Using data from an original survey experiment across three samples—the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, the 2012 Convention Delegate Study, and a 2015 sample from Amazon Mechanical Turk—I find that party–group ambivalence diminishes party loyalty, making respondents less likely to vote for, contribute to, or volunteer for their political party’s candidate. Moreover, the strength of this impact is consistently larger among Republican identifiers than Democratic identifiers. These results suggest that party asymmetry in party coalitions may have an impact on party loyalty.