New Measurements for Studying Representation in State Politics

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Central to the study of American democracy is developing a clear understanding of the contexts, conditions, and institutions that facilitate legislative representation of constituents’ interests. A key contribution of political science as a discipline has been the accumulation and use of innovative data to facilitate understanding of the connection between constituents and their representatives. The four papers on this panel continue this tradition and extend it in remarkable ways, focusing on an area that offers particularly rich opportunities for understanding representation: the American states. U.S. state governments offer scholars institutional variation in key constitutional provisions, legislative procedures, and constituency characteristics, but taking advantage of this variation to draw new inferences about representation requires the collection of new data and the development of new measurement strategies to put them to use. The papers on this panel are unified in this endeavor, though they approach questions of representation from diverse perspectives. In “Issue Representation of Rural Voters in the States” and “Institutional Design and the Polarized Views of State Governments,” authors Nemerever and Lacombe make innovative use of survey data to contextualize representation in the American states. Nemerever applies novel methods to code the urban-rural geography of survey respondents, then pairs survey responses with a bespoke data set of roll call votes on bills pertaining to issues covered in the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Lacombe develops a new measure of state governments' institutions as they relate to policy responsiveness. Focusing on the legislative perspective, authors Payson and Olson collect and operationalize new data on state legislative activity. In “ Expressed Agendas of State Legislators," Payson uses newly collected Twitter data to characterize state legislators’ focus; Olson, in “Legislative Factions in the Solid South,” collects new roll call data from state legislatures in the American South of the 1930s and 1940s to test theories of party factionalism and district representation. Put together, these four projects represent important new advances in pairing novel data and measurement to understand the constituent-representative relationship in the American states.

Sub Unit

• Division 29: State Politics and Policy

Individual Presentations

• Institutional Design and the Polarized Views of State Governments - Scott James LaCombe, Smith College

• Legislative Factions in the Solid South - Michael P. Olson, Washington University in St. Louis

• Issue Representation of Rural Voters in the States - Zoe Nemerever, Texas Tech University

• Expressed Agendas of State Legislators - Julia Payson, New York University; Andreu Casas, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Jonathan Nagler, New York University; Joshua A. Tucker, New York University

Chair

• Chris Tausanovitch University of California, Los Angeles

Discussants

• Christopher Warshaw George Washington University

• Devin Caughey Massachusetts Institute of Technology