Institutional design and the politics of US states

The purpose of this study is to understand how state political institutions fit together to influence state politics. I focus on two questions. First, how are state political institutions organized collectively? Secondly, what effects do differences in institutional design have on state politics? I collect a unique dataset of state political institutions to identify two broad commonalities for state institutions. They can increase or decrease incentives for politicians to listen to public opinion when making decisions about policy, and they influence how strong or weak a state’s checks and balance system is. I aggregate institutional data to measure how states have evolved along each dimension over time

I then use these measures to see how they affect the influence of public opinion on policy, how they affect how stable a state’s policies are, and lastly how they influence approval of state legislatures. I find that public opinion has a much stronger influence on policy in states with incentives to listen to the public, and that states with a stronger checks and balance have relatively stable policies. Lastly, I find that conservatives and Republicans are more approving of states with a strong checks and balance system, whereas Democrats and liberals prefer systems with stronger incentives to listen to the public. This project has demonstrated that there are important underlying dimensions in which state institutions are organized, and that these dimensions play a large role in state politics.