Public Opinion, Public Policy, and Organized Interests in the American States

Abstract

This article examines whether organized interests alter the strong opinion-policy linkage observed by Erikson, Wright, and McIver (1993). We first replicate the EWM model circa 1980 with the addition of measures of interest organization density and diversity under a variety of specifications. We then extend the analysis to the contemporary period, using EWMs’ new public opinion data through 1999. To execute this second stage of the analysis, we construct a new index of policy liberalism circa 2000 comparable to EWMs’ 1980 measure. Our results suggest that interest community bias in favor of traditional economic interests modestly weakens policy liberalism responsiveness, but that simply having many organized interests registered to lobby may promote more liberal policy.

Public Policies and Suicide Rates in the American States

“…Put differently, does the suicide rate vary with the overall ideological complexion of the state's policy regime? We examine this possibility by first regressing our dependent variable on a measure of general state policy liberalism first developed by Erikson et al (1993) and updated by Gray et al (2004) and then, separately, on the index of the governing ideology of state elected officials developed by Berry et al (1998). 11 We substitute these terms in place of the spending measures used previously, keeping the other variables in the model unchanged.…”

State Campaign Finance Laws and the Equality of Political Representation

“…In their seminal book on state opinion and policy, Erikson, Wright, and McIver (1993) developed a composite index of state policy liberalism using eight policy areas for which liberals and conservatives typically disagree. Gray, Lowery, Fellowes, and McAtee (2004) updated this policy liberalism measure for 2000 using the following five policy items: (1) state regulation of firearms as measured by state gun laws; (2) scorecard of state abortion laws in 2000; (3) an index of welfare stringency that accounts for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) rules of eligibility and work requirements for 1997-99; (4) a dummy measure of state right-to-work laws in 2001; and (5) a measure of tax progressivity calculated as a ratio of the average tax burden of the highest five percent of a state's earners to the average tax burden of the lowest forty percent of a state's earners. 10 These five components are then standardized and summed in an additive index such that more liberal state policies are coded higher.…”

“…11 The state policy data can be accessed online at <www.state policyindex.com>. 12 The Gray et al (2004) and Sorens et al (2008) policy liberalism measures correlate at .79 across the states.…”

“…This article approaches the task by standardizing all citizens' ideological self-placements and the two measures of general state policy liberalism described above (Gray et al 2004;Sorens et al 2008) to a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. After standardizing both opinion and policy, they are now on a common (standardized) metric similar to the strategy first proposed by Wright (1978) and commonly used in recent studies of political representation that compare citizens' opinions with the voting behavior of their member of Congress (Griffin and Flavin 2007;Griffin and Newman 2008;Ellis 2012Ellis , 2013.…”

Policy Target Populations and Public Participation in Agency Decision Making

“…Although not perfect, the number of organized interests in each state per policy area can serve as a good proxy for their ability to mobilize and affect policy outcomes 6 and has been used in prior work on organized interests (e.g., Gray and Lowery 1996;Gray et al 2004). Thus, we operationalize political power as the number of lobbyist organizations registered in each state by industry type (POWER).…”