The Iowa Supreme Court adopted an unpopular but unanimous ruling in Varnum v. Brien, which established same-sex marriage. Using a unique panel study conducted immediately before and after the court decision, we evaluate the impact of policy adoption on changing opinions on minority rights. The signaling of new social norms pressured some respondents to modify their expressed attitudes. We find that respondents whose demographic characteristics would predict support for marriage equality, but previously did not, were more likely to shift their opinions to be consistent with the new state law. A policy feedback mechanism may be responsible for the rapid diffusion of laws legalizing same-sex in the states.

The number and variety of state policies regulating abortion each year is increasing. Opponents of abortion adopted a strategy of "legal but inaccessible" that has resulted in the passage of more than 700 state laws since the early 1990s. Despite being a very active area of policy making, we lack a coherent explanation for the proliferation of abortion policy. Scholars studying different policies at discrete moments in time have come to conflicting conclusions about how well theories of morality policy and representation explain abortion policy. Using an original dataset comprised of a nearuniverse of pro-and anti-abortion rights policy from 1973 to 2013, I establish the ways in which partisan control of the government and the moral preferences of constituents shape state policy. I find that anti-abortion rights policies are well explained by both theories but that pro-abortion rights policies are not well explained as a morality policy or with descriptive representation. In addition, I show the heterogeneous effect of representation across anti-abortion rights policies; Democratic women and governors decrease the probability of only certain anti-abortion rights policies.

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Pooled event history analysis (PEHA) allows researchers to study the effects of variables across multiple policies by stacking the data and estimating the parameters in a single model. Yet this approach to modeling policy diffusion implies assumptions about homogeneity that are often violated in reality, such that the effect of a given variable is constant across policies. We relax this assumption and use Monte Carlo simulations to compare common strategies for modeling heterogeneity, testing these strategies with increasing levels of variance. We find that multilevel models with random coefficients produce the best estimates and are a significant improvement over other models. In addition, we show how modeling similar policies as multilevel structures allows researchers to more precisely explore the theoretical implications of heterogeneity across policies. We provide an empirical example of these modeling approaches with a unique data set of 29 antiabortion policies.

Schneider and Ingram introduced the pivotal theory of social construction of target populations in the American Political Science Review nearly 25 years ago. There, they developed four ideal type groups: advantaged, contenders, dependents, and deviants. They noted that there may be contention around the construction of the groups but implied an expectation of consensus. There has not been, however, a systematic categorization of politically salient target groups based on these categories, nor has there been an empirical assessment of whether or the extent to which consensus around the social constructions of salient target groups exists. We revisit this theory to offer a novel perspective and do so by leveraging advances in technology and methodological strategies. By crowdsourcing the task of evaluating the social construction of various target populations, we are able to assess underlying assumptions of theory as well as outline avenues for future research on policy design.