Recent research has focused on divided government and interest representation as sources of legislative gridlock. We hypothesize that these two factors will differentially affect the legislative process in eight different policy areas even if they do not affect the overall output of legislation. Using data from the 50 states, we found that when a governor faced a legislature controlled by the opposition party, divided government did make passage of conflictual policy more difficult. When the control of the legislature itself was split, divided government had a positive (or insignificant) effect in less conflictual policy areas. Previous scholars have failed to detect the negative effects of divided government because the effects differed across policy areas. Interest group proliferation also decreased the odds of bill passage in some policy areas but increased the odds in other arenas. It is important to examine interest groups and divided government in tandem to understand their relative impacts upon the policy process in the states.

American chief executives are popularly believed to play a crucial leadership role in the legislative process, but this role is not well understood by scholars. This article develops a model of executive leadership success in the legislative arena based on personal, institutional, political, and economic factors and tests that model with data on the legislative priorities of the 50 state governors in 1993–94. Institutional features of the executive, which have been the focus of much scholarship, are found to have little effect on a governor's legislative success. On the other hand, the nature of the legislature is quite important here, with more professional legislatures actually encouraging executive leadership. A governor's personal characteristics, political party, and a state's economy also influence a governor's legislative success. These findings point to the importance of examining chief executives in the context in which they work if we are to understand their role as legislative leader.

One of the key recommendations of the Winter Commission was the empowerment of governors over the executive branch. However, key institutions have not evolved in this direction; the long ballot still exists in most states, and the formal powers of governors have strengthened to their probable capacity. The authors suggest that a quasi‐formal power—the gubernatorial use of executive orders—may be a significant tool for empowering the governor in the state administrative realm. Analyzing all executive orders in 49 states for 2004 and 2005, they find variation in the aggregate use of and functions performed through these orders. Many executive orders do allow the government more direction and control of state bureaucracy. Finally, the authors suggest that the study of executive orders may be necessary to understand gubernatorial power in the executive arena and beyond.

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Public approval is an important tool for chief executives. It helps predict their re-election success and it may translate into greater legislative and administrative policy success. Does a governor's personality influence his or her public approval? We address this question by examining the effects of three gubernatorial motives-affiliationintimacy, achievement, and power-on public approval. We hypothesize that governors who are especially motivated by affiliation-intimacy will be more successful with the public. However, we find that governors motivated by a desire for power have greater public approval, while the affiliation-intimacy motive is unrelated to approval. Furthermore, the achievement motive is negatively related to approval in our data. We contrast these results with our earlier findings that a combination of power and achievement motives leads to gubernatorial success in the legislative arena. It appears that personality is important in determining gubernatorial success with both the public and the legislature, but in decidedly different ways.Does a state governor's personality influence his or her public approval and, if so, how? Elsewhere, we found that governors' personalities are important in shaping their success in state legislatures (Ferguson and Barth 2002), suggesting that previous studies of gubernatorial leadership may have been distinctly underspecified. Breaking with research that emphasizes institutional and structural factors (Bernick and Wiggins 1991;Crew 1992;Gross 1991;Herzik and Wiggins 1989;Thompson 1987), we showed that governors' personalities matter even when other political, economic, and institutional factors are considered. Employing the theory and methodology of David G. Winter (1987), we examined how three gubernatorial motives-power, achievement, and affiliation-intimacy-helped shape governors' success in the legislative arena. We found that governors with a combination of high power and achievement motives were significantly more likely to get what they wanted from their state legislatures. The third motive, affiliation-intimacy, was found to have no significant impact on gubernatorial success in