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Controversies over the promise and the perils of union political influence have erupted around the United States. The author develops the first evidence on the degree to which labor unions develop members' political leadership in the broader community by studying the relationship between state legislators' occupations and the unionization rates of occupations across U.S. states. The fraction of legislators of a given occupation in a state increases with the occupation's rate of unionization in that state compared with the fraction of legislators of the same occupation in other states with lower unionization rates. This pattern shows up to varying degrees among the three public-sector and one private-sector occupations considered: K–12 teachers, police officers, firefighters, and construction workers. The pattern holds conditional on differences in observable state characteristics and when using state fixed effects. Although much research has described the role of unions in influencing economic outcomes and in politics through lobbying, campaign contributions, and voter mobilization, the author adds a new perspective on the role of unions in society. They promote elected political leadership by individuals from working- and middle-class jobs. Arguments over the social value of this role of unions are explored.

Recent developments within American politics have witnessed an increase in the use of history to highlight the need for social justice and civic engagement. Yet, on its own, history is an altogether impotent means of doing so, for it fails to provide the public with the moral framework necessary for evaluating past injustices on an objective basis. To remedy this problem, this essay suggests that historians and other scholars and activists who are interested in civic engagement and social justice should look to the classical and common law traditions; the answer to the theoretical need for a solution to problems within presentist activism has, in other words, been the law. Doing so would provide a more universal and shared conception of past injustices and help increase a polity’s moral consciousness. Practically, this strategy can be implemented through a classical or liberal education, with the additional help of state legislatures. In all, this essay argues that history on its own is insufficient for moral education, that the best moral education is offered through the classical model, and that, as a practical matter, it is necessary for a legislative solution to mandate that education, if it will ever be possible to find an objective basis for civic engagement and social justice.

For most of the 400-year history of state legislatures, women and racial/ethnic minorities have been excluded as both voters and elected representatives. Although many African American men gained state-legislative office during Reconstruction and the first white women were elected in 1894, it was not until the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 and the second wave of feminist movements that women and minorities began gaining state-legislative seats in significant numbers. At the time, few political scientists noticed. By the 1990s, however, many began asking questions about gender, race/ ethnicity, and political representation and looking to the diversifying state legislatures for answers. This article assesses the trends in and research on statelegislative diversity since the 1970s. It demonstrates how the study of state legislators has contributed significantly to our understanding of gender, race/ethnicity, and representation by leveraging the rich institutional and demographic variation that the states offer. Nonetheless, I argue, there is considerably more that scholars can learn by taking intersectional approaches to the study of race/ethnicity and gender and by paying more attention to institutional structures of power.

A legislator’s duty is to vote on legislation, yet legislators routinely miss votes. Existing studies of absenteeism have focused on the US Congress, producing useful but partial explanations. We provide added insight by examining absenteeism in American state legislatures. Our data include 2,916,471 individual votes cast by 4392 legislators from 64 legislative chambers. This rich, multistate dataset produces insights that build on and sometimes conflict with Congressional research. We use a multilevel logistic model with nested and crossed random effects to estimate the influence of variables at five different levels. In particular, we investigate whether state legislators miss unimportant votes or important votes. Contrary to what Congressional studies have found, we find that state legislators avoid participating in close or major votes, favoring reelection concerns over policy influence. We also find that state-to-state variations in legislative professionalism—in particular, the length of the session—affect absenteeism, with shorter sessions leading to higher absenteeism.

Pradeep Chhibber and Ken Kollman rely on historical data spanning back to the eighteenth century from Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States to revise our understanding of why a country's party system consists of national or regional parties. They demonstrate that the party systems in these four countries have been shaped by the authority granted to different levels of government. Departing from the conventional focus on social divisions or electoral rules in determining whether a party system will consist of national or regional parties, they argue instead that national party systems emerge when economic and political power resides with the national government. Regional parties thrive when authority in a nation-state rests with provincial or state governments. The success of political parties therefore depends on which level of government voters credit for policy outcomes. National political parties win votes during periods when political and economic authority rests with the national government, and lose votes to regional and provincial parties when political or economic authority gravitates to lower levels of government. This is the first book to establish a link between federalism and the formation of national or regional party systems in a comparative context. It places contemporary party politics in the four examined countries in historical and comparative perspectives, and provides a compelling account of long-term changes in these countries. For example, the authors discover a surprising level of voting for minor parties in the United States before the 1930s. This calls into question the widespread notion that the United States has always had a two-party system. In fact, only recently has the two-party system become predominant.

American state politics scholars have generally relied on Ranney's measure of the partisan composition of state legislatures and governors' offices to evaluate competition between parties for control of state government, and Holbrook and Van Dunk's measure of the competitiveness of individual state legislative elections to evaluate the degree of electoral competition in a state. Both measure \"competition\" and were previously correlated with one another, so researchers might be tempted to consider them two measures of the same concept. This would be mistaken, however, because they are measuring two distinct concepts. We use new data on state legislative partisan balance and election returns to compute (and make publicly available) the two measures of competition from 1970 to 2003, a time span that is significantly longer than any previous study. We show that the relationship between the two measures has drastically changed over the last 30 years. Although the two measures were positively correlated in the 1970s and 1980s, they are now (as we might expect, given they are different concepts) negatively correlated. We investigate one possible explanation for this change and conclude by discussing a set of practical recommendations for scholars who plan to incorporate a measure of competition in future studies.

American state legislatures are the progeny of their colonial ancestors. Each colony that became one of the original 13 states had a representative assembly that, with minimal changes, was transformed into a state legislature following independence. In turn, those first state legislatures became models for the US Congress and all subsequent state legislatures.

Existing theories of contesting elections typically treat all potential challengers as identical while under-playing the importance of political parties and primary contests. We offer a theory addressing these issues based on how the various actors in the process define and evaluate the probability of winning an election and the value of the office being contested. We test our theory by estimating a model predicting which of three responses a party that loses a legislative race makes in the next cycle: nominating the same candidate, nominating a new candidate, or nominating no one. We find substantial empirical support for our theory. Reprinted by permission of Springer

The transformation of the American South--from authoritarian to democratic rule--is the most important political development since World War II. It has re-sorted voters into parties, remapped presidential elections, and helped polarize Congress. Most important, it is the final step in America's democratization.Paths Out of Dixieilluminates this sea change by analyzing the democratization experiences of Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Robert Mickey argues that Southern states, from the 1890s until the early 1970s, constituted pockets of authoritarian rule trapped within and sustained by a federal democracy. These enclaves--devoted to cheap agricultural labor and white supremacy--were established by conservative Democrats to protect their careers and clients. From the abolition of the whites-only Democratic primary in 1944 until the national party reforms of the early 1970s, enclaves were battered and destroyed by a series of democratization pressures from inside and outside their borders. Drawing on archival research, Mickey traces how Deep South rulers--dissimilar in their internal conflict and political institutions--varied in their responses to these challenges. Ultimately, enclaves differed in their degree of violence, incorporation of African Americans, and reconciliation of Democrats with the national party. These diverse paths generated political and economic legacies that continue to reverberate today. Focusing on enclave rulers, their governance challenges, and the monumental achievements of their adversaries,Paths Out of Dixieshows how the struggles of the recent past have reshaped the South and, in so doing, America's political development.

Several scholars have reviewed the growth and sophistication of the state-legislative literature in the past 40 years. The other six articles in this symposium attest to significant developments in multiple research areas. It is impossible in this short article to assess the entire subfield of state-legislative studies. Instead, I concentrate on four key areas: legislative professionalism, majority-party control, representation, and the impact of state constitutions on state-legislative behavior. Together, these four bodies of research demonstrate the ways that state-legislative scholars have used the comparative 50-state framework and the more innovative types of research designs to (1) create new concepts, (2) develop new theories, (3) provide rigorous tests of existing theories, and (4) open new frontiers of research. Before discussing these four areas, a short history of the subfield development is provided. State-legislative research was in its infancy five decades ago. Rigorous theoretical development that accounted for significant institutional variation and the subsequent consequences was lacking. During the next few decades, comparative cross-state studies became more common. Scholars began to identify key components that differed across legislatures and why these differences mattered. In the past 15 years, progress in state-legislative research has accelerated. We now have more systematic comparative and historical knowledge about state legislatures (Squire 2014; Squire and Moncrief 2015). Research designs are more imaginative and rigorous. Given the relative ease of assembling information from websites, we now have a wealth of data to explore a broader range of questions. Scholars have overcome major methodological problems—for example, Shor and McCarty’s (2011) use of National Political Awareness Test data.