When the local is national – A new high-water mark for nationalization in the 2018 United States state legislative elections

Melusky, Benjamin; Richman, Jesse T.

doi:10.1080/13597566.2020.1755656

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Additionally, rising partisanship and the changing media landscape privileges national issues and elections over local ones (Hopkins 2018). This has resulted in a move away from the notion that "all politics is local" to a sense that all politics is national (Hopkins 2018;Melusky and Richman 2020;Rogers 2016).…”

Section: Partisan Polarization Nationalization and State Legislaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally, the ability of state parties to influence state legislative elections through adopting relatively moderate issue stances is attenuated by high levels of national polarization (Zingher and Richman 2019). Finally, nationalization of state legislative elections reached new heights in the 2018 midterm election, even in the absence of a presidential election (Melusky and Richman 2020). These findings along with what has been observed in elections for U.S. Senate, U.S. House, governor, and other state offices, lead to my first hypothesis, that correlations between presidential and state legislative votes will be stronger in more recent elections than in a previous era.…”

Section: Partisan Polarization Nationalization and State Legislaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Nationalization of State Legislative Elections: Evidence From the Minnesota State Senate

Lynch

2023

State and Local Government Review

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This investigation explores the evolution of the relationship between national and local factors in Minnesota’s state legislative elections. Correlations demonstrate a growing connection between presidential and state legislative results between 1992 and 2020. Further, the findings reveal that national factors have exercised an outsized influence on State Senate election results in recent years, even when the strongest rival explanations are included in the analysis. In fact, when presidential vote and previous vote for a State Senate seat are assessed alongside incumbency and campaign spending in the 2020 election, presidential vote demonstrates the strongest influence on outcomes, while incumbency and candidate spending show negligible effects. The findings suggest that national factors thoroughly dominate state legislative elections. This has implications for policy responsiveness and raises the specter that the mismatch between a federal system and nationalized politics may prove unsustainable.

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Section: Partisan Polarization Nationalization and State Legislaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Partisan Polarization Nationalization and State Legislaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nationalization of State Legislative Elections: Evidence From the Minnesota State Senate

Lynch

2023

State and Local Government Review

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“…Abramowitz and Webster (2016), for example, find that in 2012, the most recent year in their data set, the correlation between the Democratic share of the presidential vote and the Democratic share of state legislative seats is 0.85, the highest correlation between the two measures since 1956. More recently, Melusky and Richman (2020) report that 2018 is a new high point for the influence of the presidential vote in state legislative elections. Beyond state legislative contests, some scholars have looked at the link between presidential voting patterns and voting patterns in statewide judicial elections.…”

Section: Data and Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

The nationalization of school superintendent elections

Weinschenk

2022

Social Science Quarterly

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Objective: Scholars have demonstrated that the U.S. presidential vote is increasingly correlated with voting patterns in House, Senate, gubernatorial, state legislative, and state judicial elections, a phenomenon called nationalization. In this article, I examine the relationship between vote share in presidential and school superintendent elections. Methods: I conduct correlation and regression analyses using an original data set containing county-level election results from 2000 to 2021 for all states that hold statewide school superintendent elections. Results: I find that there is a statistically significant relationship between presidential and superintendent voting in both partisan and nonpartisan elections even after accounting for incumbency, although the relationship is appreciably stronger in states that hold partisan school superintendent elections. In addition, there has been an uptick in the strength of the relationship between presidential and state superintendent vote patterns over time in both partisan and nonpartisan states, although the increase is more pronounced in nonpartisan states. Conclusions:The results indicate that even some of the most low-salience, down-ballot elections have nationalized.Political scientists have recently started to pay more attention to the role of national political factors in subpresidential elections, and there is a growing consensus that elections for many offices in the United States have nationalized. According to Sievert and McKee (2019), nationalization "refers to an increasing linkage between presidential voting patterns with subpresidential contests at the federal, state, and local level" (p. 1056). Although there is now a tight connection between the presidential vote and voting in many different types of elections (Abramowitz and Webster 2016;Hopkins 2018;Jacobson 2015;Sievert and McKee 2019;Weinschenk et al. 2020), the extent to which presidential vote patterns align with voting in a variety of low-salience, down-ballot elections remains an open question. In this article, I contribute to the growing literature on the nationalization of U.S. elections by examining the relationship between U.S. presidential elections and school superintendent elections, which are typically low-profile races. 1 At least

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“…Recent analysis of local television coverage, for example, has noted an increase in the influence of the national news agenda, with local television mirroring more national news items and featuring fewer genuinely local stories, and a general right-ward ideological slant (Martin and McCrain 2019). It is worth noting that the nationalization of elections and politics generally is an increasing trend observable in voter behavior (Melusky and Richman 2020).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local News Online and COVID in the U.S.: Relationships among Coverage, Cases, Deaths, and Audience

Joseph

Horne

Green

et al. 2022

ICWSM

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We present analyses from a real-time information monitoring system of online local news in the U.S. We study relationships among online local news coverage of COVID, cases and deaths in an area, and properties of local news outlets and their audiences. Our analysis relies on a unique dataset of the online content of over 300 local news outlets, encompassing over 750,000 articles over a period of 10 months spanning April 2020 to February 2021. We find that the rate of COVID coverage over time by local news outlets was primarily associated with death rates at the national level, but that this effect dissipated over the course of the pandemic as news about COVID was steadily displaced by sociopolitical events, like the 2020 U.S. elections. We also find that both the volume and content of COVID coverage differed depending on local politics, and outlet audience size, as well as evidence that more vulnerable populations received less pandemic-related news.

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When the local is national – A new high-water mark for nationalization in the 2018 United States state legislative elections

Cited by 13 publications

References 29 publications

Nationalization of State Legislative Elections: Evidence From the Minnesota State Senate

Nationalization of State Legislative Elections: Evidence From the Minnesota State Senate

The nationalization of school superintendent elections

Local News Online and COVID in the U.S.: Relationships among Coverage, Cases, Deaths, and Audience

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