Social scientists have given increasing attention to the diffusion of policy innovations among the American stales, focusing on the legislative and administrative sectors. This study is an effort to expand our understanding of policy diffusion by analyzing the diffusion of 23 innovative tort doctrines among slate court systems between 1876 and 1975. This analysis examines the innovativeness of state judicial systems, the correlates of innovativeness, and the pattern of diffusion. The findings suggest that the diffusion of judicial doctrines is a very different process from the diffusion of legislation. A major reason for the difference appears to be the courts' dependence on litigants to provide opportunities for innovation.

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Ballots used in the American states differ in the information that they provide about candidates. This article examines the effects of ballot information on voters' decisions whether and how to vote in individual contests, effects on which scholars have not yet provided direct evidence. The study employs experimental manipulations within pre-election and post-election surveys on three contests for seats on a state supreme court. Ballot information on candidates' incumbency status and city of residence had little impact on voters' decisions. In contrast, information on candidates' party affiliations had substantial and interconnected effects on participation and choice. These findings illuminate voter decisionmaking in low-information contests, and they demonstrate that the choice between partisan and nonpartisan ballots in judicial elections is indeed consequential.

Measuring the U.S. Supreme Court's policy changes is complicated by change in the content of the cases that come before the Court. I adapt from earlier scholarship a method to correct for changes in case content and use this method to measure change in the Court's support for civil liberties in the 1946–85 terms. Analysis based on this method indicates that because of changes in case content, the average difficulty of reaching a pro-civil liberties result varied during that period. With corrections for case difficulty, the Warren Court of the 1950s appears to have been more conservative, and the Burger Court more liberal, than patterns of case outcomes themselves suggest. This method, while imperfect, has utility for the measurement of policy change in the Supreme Court and other institutions and thus can serve as a building block in analyses of the processes and determinants of change.

The primary source of divided government in the United States is voters who split their ballots between the parties. Yet there has been little comprehensive examination of either patterns or sources of ticket splitting in recent years. Instead, divergent lines of research have emerged, emphasizing such things as voter partisanship, incumbency, and a “new” (young, well-educated, even partisan) kind of ticket splitter; and their focus has been too often restricted to the atypical president–Congress pair. We seek to unify these research traditions in a comprehensive model of split-ticket voting and to test this model across the partisan ballot in a typical election setting-here, the contests for five Ohio state-wide offices in 1990. The model incorporates partisan strength, candidate visibility, and the individual characteristics that distinguish the “new ticket splitters”. The results support our partisan strength and candidate visibility explanations but provide little support for the emergence of a new type of ticket splitter.