State Politics & Policy Quarterly

What effect does the professional character of a legislature have on the power of its legislative leaders? Despite legislative scholars' desire to better understand both institutional professionalism and leadership power, few empirical studies have explored the relationship between these two important elements of American state legislatures. Moreover, of the research that has been conducted, little effort has been made to understand the impact of professionalism on leadership from a theoretical perspective. This article expands our understanding of legislative professionalism and leadership while testing three theoretical models of legislative organization. I examine the effect of professionalism and several control variables on the influence of state house leaders in 38 non-southern states in 1981 and 1995. Contrary to the fears of some analysts, I find that more professional state legislatures tend to have more powerful leaders. These results provide support for a partisan model of legislative organization.

Term limits advocates argued that their reform would make state legislative campaigns more competitive and less expensive, and limited early studies suggested that it may have achieved those goals. But now, with evidence from more than a decade of experience with reform, we re-examine the effects of terms limits on electoral competitiveness and campaign spending in California Assembly elections. We find that while term limits initially suppressed campaign spending, they did not check its growth for long. Today, California's state legislative elections are as expensive in real dollars as they have ever been. In terms of electoral competitiveness, state legislative incumbents are in no more danger of losing their seats today than they were in the pre-term limits days of the late 1980s. Furthermore, open-seat races are not any more competitive under term limits than before them; however, we do find a modest, but significant, decline in incumbents' average winning margin since the imposition of term limits. But since term limits have made fewer incumbents eligible to run for office, this incumbency advantage helps fewer people than it once did. Yet, for the most part, rather than being supplanted by citizen-legislators, career politicians have simply adapted to the constraints imposed by term limits.

Interest groups have many tactics to choose from in pursuing their policy goals. While inside tactics have received considerable scholarly attention, outside tactics have been adopted increasingly by groups of all kinds. We explore one such lobbying tactic by examining the relationship between interest groups and journalists in the American states. Through a survey of statehouse reporters, we find that lobbyists are useful sources of information for these reporters, who even rank them above many more traditional sources of information. Our data also show that contact between interest groups and journalists varies systematically across the states. Specifically, interest groups in states with large or small numbers of interest groups have more contact with journalists than interest groups in states with an average number of groups. Furthermore, journalists in states where interest groups are relatively powerful claim to interact with those groups less than journalists in states where interest groups are less powerful.

This article analyzes existing scholarship on the diffusion of public policies among the American states, focusing on recent developments in this line of research and suggesting several potential avenues for future work. The analysis is organized around three fundamental questions. First, why does policy diffusion occur? Answering this question will require scholars to devote more attention to concepts such as imitation, emulation, and competition. Second, which political forces facilitate or impede policy diffusion? Answering this question will require scholars to devote more attention to the causal mechanisms at work when states adopt policies like those of other states. Third, what is being diffused? Answering this question will require scholars to think more carefully about the content of public policy, both as an outcome to be explained and as a factor that itself affects the diffusion process.

State politics scholars often confront data situations where the explanatory variables in a model are highly related to each other. Such multicollinearity (“MC”) makes it difficult to identify the independent effect that each of these variables has on the outcome of interest. In an effort to circumvent MC, researchers sometimes drop collinear variables from the regression model. Using simulated data, we demonstrate the implications that MC has for statistical estimation and the potential for introducing bias that the omitting-variables approach generates. We also discuss MC in the context of multiplicative interaction models, using research on the influence of the initiative on policy responsiveness as an applied example. We conclude with advice for researchers faced with MC in their datasets.