The Correlates of State Policy and the Structure of State Panel Data

Abstract

The American states offer a wealth of variation across time and space to understand the sources, dynamics, and consequences of public policy. As laboratories of socioeconomic and political differences, they enable both wide-scale assessments of change and studies of specific policy choices. To leverage this potential, we constructed and integrated a database of thousands of state-year variables for designing and executing social research: the Correlates of State Policy Project (CSPP). The database offers one-stop shopping for accurate and reliable data, allows researchers to assess the generalizability of the relationships they uncover, enables assessment of causal inferences, and connects state politics researchers to larger research communities. We demonstrate CSPP’s use and breadth, as well as its limitations. Through an applied empirical approach familiar to the state politics literature, we show that researchers should remain attentive to regional variation in key variables and potential lack of within-state variation in independent and dependent variables of interest. By comparing commonly used model specifications, we demonstrate that results are highly sensitive to particular research design choices. Inferences drawn from state politics research largely depend on the nature of over time variation within and across states and the empirical leverage it may or may not provide.

Institutional Design and Policy Responsiveness in US States

“…Just as in the original analysis, the only control included is a lagged measure of unified Democratic control, and the institutional measures described above will replace the institutional interactions in the models. Unlike the original analysis, additional specifications are included with controls for state income per capita, state population, and the percent of the population that is black (Grossmann et al, 2021) to test if institutional effects are sensitive to potential confounding factors. I estimate four parallel sets of models, one for responsiveness without controls, dynamic responsiveness without controls, and both models with controls for social and economic policy liberalism.…”

LocalView, a database of public meetings for the study of local politics and policy-making in the United States

“…The few large-scale datasets that do exist on local governments, which are generally government releases such as the US Census of Governments for municipalities or the Common Core for school districts from the National Center for Education Statistics, may contain structural and administrative characteristics but are generally insufficient for scholars interested in topics like policy-making and deliberations. A recent explosion of datasets in the social sciences has led to unprecedented, large-scale study of U.S. politics, elections, and policy-making at the national [5][6][7][8] and state levels 9,10 . Meanwhile, most contemporary studies of local policy-making rely primarily on case studies or small sets of individual places 11,12 , lab experiments 13 , or have required extensive (and expensive) manual data collection [14][15][16][17] .…”

What makes a leader? A Role Analysis of Latent Diffusion Networks

“…We also include variables frequently used in studies to predict policy innovations and diffusion. We include a measure of policy liberalism (Caughey and Warshaw 2016), income per capita (standardized), population (standardized) (Grossmann, Jordan, and McCrain 2021), and two dimensions of legislative professionalism as measured by Bowen and Greene (2014). Lastly, we include separate variables for each policy area to evaluate the role potential policy "demands" that could lead to a state becoming a policy leader.…”

“…We use data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) Survey to measure the percentage of the workforce that is in health care, transportation, education, and manufacturing to measure demand for policies in health, transportation, education, and labor respectively (Statistics 2017). To measure demand for law and crime policies, we use a measure of violent crime per 100,000 people, and we use the unemployment rate to measure demand for macro-economic policies (Grossmann, Jordan, and McCrain 2021). As an additional measure of demand for labor policies, we use a measure for the percentage of a state's workforce that is in a private or public sector union (Hirsch, Macpherson, and Vroman 2001).…”