Scholarship holds that procedural rules shape legislative proceedings, but most existing evidence comes from the US Congress' limited procedural variation. This article develops a theoretical framework for how different forms of debate restriction—both limits on member participation and procedural hurdles to closing debate—affect legislative productivity, and how these effects depend on chambers' institutional capacity. Using an original dataset of debate rules and bill progression spanning 2011–2018 from all 99 US state legislative chambers, we show that restrictions on member speaking opportunities and ending debate are associated with higher legislative productivity, with the relationship operating through distinct mechanisms. Procedural hurdles to ending debate are associated with higher productivity in low-professionalism legislatures, while these associations diminish or reverse in more professionalized chambers. These findings demonstrate the conditional nature of debate rules and institutional capacity, offering new insight into procedural designs and the tradeoff between deliberation and efficiency in lawmaking.

Party unity is central to studying legislative politics and explaining the organization of legislative chambers, passage of policy, and even electoral outcomes. Its effect has been shown at the subnational, national, and international levels. While party unity has been used to explain many phenomena in legislative politics, there is much less known about the determinants of party unity, especially at the subnational level. We leverage a dataset of party unity in 95 U.S. state legislative chambers from 2002 to 2014, to test the impact of party structures, institutional rules, and contextual factors on the level of party unity. We find that majority status, party seat share, and the other party's unity impact party unity similarly for both parties, but the effect of inter-party heterogeneity differs by party. These findings offer a new and unique insight to how partisan theories operate differently within state legislative versus Congressional parties.

The literature on congressional decision-making has largely ignored the influence of the minority party in the legislative process. This follows from the widely held belief that the majority party dominates the agenda-setting process. Though the minority party rarely achieves major policy success in Congress, we argue that the minority has significantly more influence over the legislative agenda than is commonly believed. We posit that, under some conditions, the minority has enough bargaining leverage to get floor votes on their proposals, in the form of both amendments and bills. We test our theoretical expectations with a novel design utilizing whip count data from the House and show that when a whip count on a bill occurs, the likelihood of a minority amendment disappointment and a majority amendment roll increases, respectively. This suggests that the more leverage the minority party has, the more we see their legislative proposals on the floor.

Committee seats endow holders with both policy influence and labor obligation. These benefits and costs present the organizational majority with an interesting choice: how many seats should it allocate to the opposition? We present a theoretical framework for understanding the allocation of committee seats by the majority coalition that incorporates both procedural and electoral concerns in the decision calculus and predict that when the majority is strong, the minority will be overrepresented on committees, but when the majority is weak, the minority will be underrepresented. Mechanistic, institutional, and contextual moderators to this choice framework are also discussed. We test our predictions by examining original data on the composition of over 2,000 committees across 98 American state and federal legislative chambers. The analysis yields strong support for our central predictions while suggesting interesting and intuitive contextual constraints on the majority’s tendency to exploit its position.

We present a parsimonious framework for understanding contextual variation in legislative nonresponse. We argue that legislators’ propensity to vote is a function of their willingness and ability to be physically present in the chamber and determine the best position to take on a given proposal. From this framework, we derive four hypotheses regarding the compensation legislators receive, their opportunity to pursue work outside of the chamber, and their informational resources. Analyzing data on over seven million voting opportunities across two sessions in ninety-nine chambers, we find robust evidence that longer legislative sessions decrease nonresponse and that informational resources increase nonresponse, but no evidence that compensation influences nonresponse.

Scholars, advocates, and survivors of American Indian industrial boarding schools have documented the harm these institutions have inflicted on tribal communities and individuals subject to separation from families and communities, denial of culture, and in some cases abuse and death. Less well understood is that these schools also functioned as distributive policies that economically benefited Euro-American settler communities. In states with sizable American Indian populations, settler communities lobbied aggressively for the schools and competed with nearby towns for the jobs, service and supply contracts, and student labor that these institutions provided. Schools were seen as a boon for local economic development, including as tourist attractions, and as a steady source of government resources in a period of economic uncertainty. Local business boosters donated land and money as part of the lobbying efforts. Congressmen delivered these schools to claim credit for constituency service. We examine these dynamics in an analysis of the placement of all off-reservation Indian industrial boarding schools from 1880–1908 using contemporary newspaper accounts. We analyze an original database of school site selection and Congressional support, showing that school placement was a political calculation, tying together the interests of local economic elites and ambitious members of Congress. Indian industrial schools offer a lens into how assimilation policies were advanced through political channels in response to Euro-American demands for economic development and access to land.

The public choice literature has long considered the political economy of environmental regulation and has examined a variety of national and subnational governments’ environmental policies aimed at adaption to climate change. However, there has been little attention paid to the determinants of environmental adaptive actions taken by indigenous governments. Given many indigenous peoples’ heightened vulnerability to issues caused by climate change, it is important to understand when and why they take action to adapt to climate change and what obstacles may stand in the way. I argue that natural resource abundance, informational resource access, population vulnerability, and reliance on natural resources will impact whether indigenous governments enact policies to respond to climate change. Using an original dataset of tribal actions addressing climate change for 574 federally recognized tribal governments, I find that the amount of land, educational attainment, broadband access, and proportion of tribal members working in the natural resource industries are positively associated with the tribal government’s responses to climate change.

A basic premise of democracy is that all citizens have an equal opportunity to participate in governance via the ballot. Decades of research have shown that electoral access is inequitable even if it is equal—meaning that while most have the right to vote, some face greater barriers than others. One of the challenges in assessing the degree of electoral equity in the United States is that the country does not have a single electoral system; instead, it consists of multiple systems at the state and local levels. The local level of election administration is a critical aspect of the U.S. electoral system, with important implications for voter access. Voting access varies widely within states depending on service provision by local election officials. To better understand the role of local election administration and its impact on voters, we develop a novel, empirically grounded tool for measuring local-level voter access: the Measure of Voter Equity (MOVE) index. To construct this measure, we conducted an intensive pilot data collection project at the county level in two states—Arizona and Nevada. We find that rural counties in both states have significantly lower levels of access. The MOVE index, along with its subcomponent scores, offers a comprehensive measure of voting access at the local level that can be used by scholars and policy practitioners to more precisely assess electoral equity.

In the United States, state governments play an essential role in balancing the interests of consumers and electricity providers. While scholars have explored how regulations are crafted, less attention has been paid to the impact of regulation, particularly on the disadvantaged. By analyzing data on over two decades of disconnections, we find that investor-owned utilities have significantly lower disconnection rates than municipal utilities, despite the latter’s public-oriented mandate. We contend that the public-facing nature of municipalization makes unpopular redistribution more visible (and hence provided at lower levels) compared with private investor-owned utilities. We also find that having a renewable portfolio standard is associated with lower levels of disconnection, whereas deregulation and the direct election of commissioners have no discernible effect. These findings underscore how subnational policy variations shape essential service provision in the United States and have broad implications for regulation and human capital, given possible federal volatility in electricity policymaking.

Objective. Various shirking behaviors in survey-taking can inhibit researchers’ ability to draw unbiased inferences from the resulting data. We define three types of shirking behavior, identify their demographic correlates among survey respondents, show how shirking may lead to biased or incorrect inferences, and offer suggestions for navigating these threats. Methods. We analyze responses from a large (N=3,256), representative survey of Americans, identify indicators of three types of shirking, and regress these indicators on survey firm administrative data on respondent characteristics to discover the respondent characteristics associated with different shirking types. Results. The data suggest women are more likely to break off during a survey, while men are more likely to shirk while completing the instrument. In addition, young, less educated respondents are more likely to use straight-lining or other satisficing tactics. Conclusion. Systematic differences in shirking behaviors across these demographic groups make us likely to misunderstand the (reported) social behavior of women and men, young and old, or more and less educated, in different ways. This is particularly problematic for testing behavioral theories that generate gender, age, or education-specific predictions, or, predictions regarding attitudes or behaviors that strongly correlated to these characteristics.