One might worry, however, that this test is too lenient. The ideology-policy correlation is the dominant approach in studies of state responsiveness, and it has been the most fruitful approach to date. However, problems of inference arise because researchers cannot know exactly how diffuse preference measures ought to translate into policy. That is, policy and ideology lack a common metric (Erikson, Wright, and McIver 1993, 93;Matsusaka 2001 but without knowing the mapping of ideology to voter policy preferences, we cannot tell if policy is over-or underresponsive to preferences.Most existing work, by focusing on the ideologypolicy correlation, also does not assess how responsive states are to voter preferences on specific policies. Nor does it tell us how effective state political systems are at translating opinion majorities into public policy. If a majority of voters in a state wants to adopt a lottery or impose an abortion restriction, how likely is the state to do so? In other words, is policy usually congruent with majority will?Both responsiveness and congruence are forms of policy representation, but they capture different dimensions of democratic performance. To be clear, by responsiveness, we mean a positive correlation between opinion and policy; by congruence, we mean that policy actually matches majority opinion. Where majority will is truly sovereign, you would expect both strong responsiveness and a high level of congruence. Policy adoption may increase with higher public support (suggesting responsiveness), but policy may still often be inconsistent with majority opinion (suggesting a lack of congruence),

We study the effects of policy-specific public opinion on state adoption of policies affecting gays and lesbians, and the factors that condition this relationship. Using national surveys and advances in opinion estimation, we create new estimates of state-level support for eight policies, including civil unions and nondiscrimination laws. We differentiate between responsiveness to opinion and congruence with opinion majorities. We find a high degree of responsiveness, controlling for interest group pressure and the ideology of voters and elected officials. Policy salience strongly increases the influence of policy-specific opinion (directly and relative to general voter ideology). There is, however, a surprising amount of noncongruence—for some policies, even clear supermajority support seems insufficient for adoption. When noncongruent, policy tends to be more conservative than desired by voters; that is, there is little progay policy bias. We find little to no evidence that state political institutions affect policy responsiveness or congruence.

D emocratic theory suggests that the varying attitudes and policy preference of citizens across states should play a large role in shaping both electoral outcomes and policymaking. Accurate measurements of state-level opinion are therefore needed to study a wide range of related political issues, issues at the heart of political science such as representation and policy responsiveness.Unfortunately, measuring state opinion is not easy. Despite the proliferation of public opinion polls, statelevel surveys are still quite rare. Finding comparable surveys across all (or even many) states is nearly impossible. And, while most national poll data include the home state of the respondents, there are almost always too few respondents within each state to be considered an adequate sample.In response to these problems, scholars have devised sophisticated techniques for coping with sparse data, techniques which allow them to use national surveys to generate estimates of state-level opinion. The two main Jeffrey R. Lax is assistant professor, Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York City, NY 10027 (JRL2124@ columbia.edu). Justin H. Phillips is assistant professor, Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York City, NY 10027 (jhp2121@columbia.edu).We thank Bernd Beber, Robert Erikson, Donald Haider-Markel, John Kastellec, Robert Shapiro, Greg Wawro, and Gerald Wright for helpful comments; Kevin Jason for research assistance; and the Columbia University Applied Statistics Center. Earlier versions were presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association and at the Department of Political Science at SUNY Stony Brook.1 This work, dating at least as far back as Pool, Abelson, and Popkin (1965), estimated state opinion using demographic correlations estimated at the national level and then weighted the predictions by demographic type given each state's demographic composition. Differences between states were only incorporated in terms of demographics, so that two demographically identical states would have identical predictions. methods are disaggregation and simulation. However, each method raises some concerns-and important questions remain as to which method should be used, when, and how.The currently dominant method is disaggregation, developed and popularized by Erikson, Wright, and McIver (1993). This method pools large numbers of national surveys and then disaggregates the data so as to calculate opinion percentages by state. Erikson, Wright, and McIver's work grew, in part, out of a critique of earlier methods that simulated state-level public opinion using only demographic data.1 Erikson, Wright, and McIver showed that states vary even after controlling for demographics and that the difference between state effects is often the same magnitude as the effect of shifting demographic categories (1993, 53). In short, we should not ignore geography.Disaggregation is easily implemented, in that it skips any analysis of demographic correlations. It does, howeve...

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A ppellate courts make policy, not only by hearing cases themselves, but by establishing legal rules for the disposition of future cases. The problem is that such courts are generally multimember, or collegial, courts. If different judges prefer different rules, can a collegial court establish meaningful legal rules? Can preferences that take the form of legal rules be aggregated? I use a "case-space" model to show that there will exist a collegial rule that captures majoritarian preferences, and to show that there will exist a median rule even if there is no single median judge. I show how collegial rules can differ from the rules of individual judges and how judicial institutions (such as appellate review and the power to write separate opinions) affect the stability and enforceability of legal rules. These results are discussed in light of fundamental debates between legal and political perspectives on judicial behavior.