Party Pressure in the U.S. State Legislatures

Abstract

We extend Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart's (2001) method of measuring party influence over roll‐call voting to the comparative state legislative context. Examining 27 state lower chambers, we find that overall parties exert detectable influence on 44% of all roll calls and 69% of close votes, but that the incidence of party influence varies strongly across chambers. Taking advantage of the comparative leverage the state context brings, we find that party influence responds significantly to measures of legislative careerism and state socioeconomic diversity, with majority size playing some role. The effect of preference polarization is complicated and conditioned by challenges facing the legislature, and we find results both challenging and conditionally supporting the conditional party government account.

Examining Legislative Cue‐Taking in the US Senate

“…One duplicates the pooled model but also includes an interaction term where the effect of party leadership is conditioned on the level of debate. Following the literature (e.g., Cohen and Malloy ; Coleman Battista and Richman ), we also estimate a second set of models on two different data sets—those that are classified as heavily debated versus nonheavily debated (per the previous discussion); we do this because of our theoretical contention that different types of votes should display distinct cue‐giving and cue‐taking behavior and because we expect relationships for certain types of senators to change based on the voting environment . While most of the votes classified as “heavily debated” contain voting patterns consistent with partisan divisions, they also involve the defection of a number of Democratic senators who voted with the Republicans (consistent with theories of congressional polarization, which suggest that Republicans are usually more unified than Democrats; e.g., Theriault ) .…”

Legislative Effectiveness in the American States

“…This is especially true-and easier to accomplish-when members of the majority party are themselves closely aligned ideologically. At the state level, scholars have used a variety of approaches that yield mixed support for this hypothesis (e.g., Aldrich and Battista 2002;Battista and Richman 2011;Mooney 2012).…”

“…Fourth, consistent with Anzia and Jackman (2013), we find that majority-party agenda control via the calendar enhances the lawmaking effectiveness advantage of majority-party members; there is suggestive evidence that the majority party also benefits from committee gatekeeping powers. These procedural elements also seem to improve the effectiveness of 18 Scholars have engaged in a robust debate around how to measure the power of party leaders in state legislatures (e.g., Aldrich and Battista 2002;Battista and Richman 2011;Clucas 2007). We here rely on the Anzia and Jackman metrics due to their objective measurement approach (based on formal rules) and due to their availability and consistency across chambers and over time.…”

Reconsidering State Variation in Incarceration Rates

“…Existing research indicates the majority party of a legislature controls the process by producing unified voting blocks and by manipulating procedures and rules to control what reaches and what does not reach the formal agenda (Battista and Richman 2011;Clark 2012;Cox, Kousser, and McCubbins 2010). Kousser (2002, 668) suggests "that state policymakers are not neutral," and partisanship plays a strong role in policy outcomes.…”