Abstract
The power and ability of state governments to impose regulations vary according to the state and national politics, policy problems, the nature and power of business and groups, and state institutional structures. Citizens regularly complain about the regulatory reach of the state but often demand state regulation of the environment, consumer safety, industry, insurance, health care, and professions. State elected officials likewise complain about the regulatory reach of the state and, in some cases, work diligently to remove regulations that are thought to hamper industries or that citizens find especially egregious. Sometimes there is disagreement over what constitutes desirable and undesirable regulations. For example, in 2010, the Florida legislature passed a seemingly simple law requiring septic systems to be inspected every 5 years. It was proposed by Republican members of the House and Senate and supported by the state peak homebuilders association, which is a strong interest in a state long dominated by the real estate industry. The then-presiding governor ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate and the incoming Republican governor won the election narrowly with strong rural conservative support. Some of the legislators who had initially signed the previously uncontroversial regulation heard complaints from their constituents regarding the possible cost of mandated repairs and the estimated $150–$200 price of inspections every 5 years. He refused to sign the law, arguing that septic tank regulation is a function best left to county governments. There is no mandatory septic system inspection in Florida, which environmental groups note is dangerous given the state’s being situated on top of the Floridan aquifer that provides water for drinking, agriculture, and recreation for the state’s citizens and is threatened by leaking septic systems.
The Florida septic system regulation issue points to the nature of state regulatory politics. (It also allowed pundits to refer to “a smelly problem,” “regulation going down the drain,” and so on.) Most people can agree that it is bad to have faulty septic systems. Many would agree that it is sensible to inspect them with some regularity. Unfortunately most people do not agree with who should pay the price of regulation or which level of government (or perhaps not government at all) should be responsible for the regulation. The outcome of the septic system regulation is that the state has no rule even though the state environmental regulatory agencies believe it is necessary and the majority of the state’s citizenry lives in areas with nonseptic waste disposal and pay considerably more for waste disposal than people with septic systems. Regulatory issues sometimes seem like no-brainers but invoke strong proponents and opponents and are thus politically contentious.
In February 2014, the DeVoe Moore Center at Florida State University invited a group of political scientists and public administrators to participate in a seminar on research on regulation in the U.S. states. The Center commissioned 12 papers and invited their authors and reviewers to discuss broad themes in regulation in the states and to focus on new avenues in research in the area. The conference led to the production of a dozen thoughtful and, in some cases, innovative and inventive papers. Four of the papers from the meeting are published as a mini-symposium in this special volume of State Politics & Policy Quarterly (SPPQ).
The papers were organized in four panels. The first focused on state-level regulation of individuals, focusing on the “nanny state” and causal attributions of support for state regulation of nutrition (Haider-Markel and Joslyn 2014), and on state regulation of access to voting in one state (Smith 2014). The second focused on substantive regulation of specific policies, in this case energy (Terman 2014), the environment (Konisky and Reenock 2014), and prisons (Davis and Bali 2014). The third session was organized around the state regulatory and administrative politics. Papers in that session focus on the effects of formal and informal influence in state lawmaking (Yackee 2015), whether and how state regulators’ membership in professional organizations affects state regulation (Keiser 2014), and how administrative rule review politics vary among the states (Wood 2015). The fourth and final session included papers on oversight by state legislatures (Boehmke and Shipan 2015), how term limits affect special interests’ legislative fortunes (Goelzhauser 2014), and whether and how networks and interests groups interact to influence the diffusion of regulations (Garrett and Jansa 2015).
The papers were imaginative, and some were better suited for political behavior, public policy journals, and public administration journals than to SPPQ. The papers included here include two that address state government administrative practices, and two address state institutional politics. Susan Yackee’s article shows that administrative lawmaking is influenced most strongly by formal as well as informal actions. She collects original archival data, survey data of individuals working on health regulations in Wisconsin, and interviews with state policy makers to analyze the effects of formal versus informal lobbying on the passage of regulatory policy. Her results suggest that the invisible lobbying actions are crucial accompaniments of visible lobbying, suggesting that having “behind the scenes” influence is crucial. Neil Woods’s research suggests that the structure of state government affects the use of and effects of administrative rule reviews. He reports that rule reviews’ effects are subtle, complex, are difficult to discern, but play important roles in shaping regulatory outcomes.
The other two articles focus more specifically on regulation politics in state legislatures. Fred Boehmke and Charles Shipan ask whether state agency actions reflect the preferences of legislators and whether legislative professionalism affects the ability of legislators to act on those preferences. They analyze the scope of state nursing home inspections and find that Democratic legislators, whose preferences for regulation are assumed by the authors to be higher than those of Republican legislators, do support more regulation. In addition, the effect is conditioned by legislative professionalism in the chamber, with more professional legislatures enabling their members to achieve their preferences more successfully. The second article, by Kristin Garrett and Joshua Jansa, uses a novel approach that relies on text analysis of legislation and text similarity scores to model policy diffusion networks in two policies, abortion insurance restrictions and self-defense statutes. The results point to a much different model of policy diffusion than we typically expect, which is one in which state characteristics drive outcomes. Instead, these results point to the influence of state model legislation that has flown under the radar of contemporary state policy research but increasingly appears to be important. Garrett and Jansa’s work is among the first to estimate this phenomenon across state policy networks. Their article is strong technically and provides a useful piece of information for observers of state politics.
We are collectively grateful to the DeVoe Moore Center and its then-director Keith Ihlanfeldt and present director, Sam Staley, for providing generous support for the colloquium, and to Ms. Judy Kirk for administering the logistics of the meeting and making things run so smoothly. Bob Crew, Carol Weissert, and Dick Winters generously gave their time to read and comment on papers. Finally, Tom Carsey, his staff at SPPQ, Chris Bonneau and Kris Kantak and their staff, and several anonymous reviewers did a wonderful job of marshaling these papers from manuscript to publication.