Faith and Politics at the State Level

2022 ◽  
pp. 53-107

This chapter describes legislator faith beliefs based on their evangelical or liberal multilayered moral worldviews. These views are not merely tools that are used but symbolic boundaries by which preferences are molded, values are shaped, and political perspectives are informed. Contributing to these ideological differences is the changing religious landscape in America. These opposing visions represent deep cultural divisions that influence state legislative decision-making, especially for members of the LGBTQ community.

This chapter describes the ideological forms and beliefs that are considered either evangelical or liberal. The differences between these two types of faith worldviews influence legislative decision making and inform culture. To the extent that gay issues represent a cultural divide between religious traditionalism and progressivism policy outcomes are impacted by these differences.


ILR Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 001979392097093
Author(s):  
Olatunde C. A. Johnson

In recent years, labor and civil rights groups have successfully pushed for local regulation raising the minimum wage, creating new parenting and sick leave policies, and broadening anti-discrimination protections to address sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. This article examines the viability of this worker-protective regulation at the local level in the face of current legal and political challenges. In particular, it considers the rise of state preemption laws that overturn local ordinances, which is the product of anti-regulatory mobilization at the state legislative level. The article provides case studies of state preemption and offers potential legal arguments for challenging preemption and safeguarding labor and civil rights localism. The author concludes, however, that given the uncertainty of whether these legal arguments will prevail in court, civil rights and labor advocates will need to engage politics at the state level to preserve and expand local innovations.


2008 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-543 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Walker

In recent years, the idea that constitutional modes of government are exclusive to states has become the subject both of sustained challenge and of strong defence. This is due to the development at new regional and global sites of decision-making capacities of a scale and intensity often associated with the demand for constitutional governance at state level, to the supply at these same new sites of certain regulatory institutions and practices of a type capable of being viewed as meeting the demand for constitutional governance, as well as to a growing debate over whether and in what ways these developments in decision-making capacity and regulatory control should be coded and can be constructively engaged with in explicitly constitutional terms. The aim of the article is threefold. It asks why taking the idea and associated ethos and methods of constitutionalism ‘beyond the state’ might be viewed as a significant and controversial innovation, and so in need of explanation and justification – a question that requires us to engage with the definition of constitutionalism and with the contestation surrounding that definition. Secondly, taking account of the various arguments that lie behind these definitional concerns, it attempts to develop a scheme for understanding certain key features of constitutionalism and of its post-state development that is able to command broad agreement. Thirdly, and joining the concerns of the first two sections, it seeks to identify the key current tensions – or antinomies – surrounding the growth of post-state constitutionalism with a view to indicating what is at stake in the future career of that concept.


2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 356-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Hayes Clark ◽  
Tracy Osborn ◽  
Jonathan Winburn ◽  
Gerald C. Wright

Roll-call data have become a staple of contemporary scholarship on legislative behavior. Recent methodological innovations in the analysis of roll-call data have produced a number of important theoretical insights, such as understanding the structure of congressional decisionmaking and the role of parties and ideology in Congress. Many of the methodological innovations and theoretical questions sparked by congressional scholarship have been difficult to test at the state level because of the lack of comprehensive data on various forms of state legislative behavior, including roll-call voting. The Representation in America's Legislatures project rectifies that problem through collection of comprehensive state legislative roll-call votes across all 99 state legislative chambers for the 1999–2000 and 2003–04 legislative sessions. In this article, we describe the data available through this project as well as our data acquisition procedures, including Stata and Perl programming and OCR of paper documents, with suggestions about how to use these methods to collect a wide range of state-level data.


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-19
Author(s):  
Andrii Lysyi

In the framework of reformation changes in the state and society, the issues of the political decision-making theory developing on the basis of neoclassical realism are of particular relevance and determine the directions for research of specialists of different industries. Domestic and foreign researchers in the field of political science, who study the process of political decision-making, analyze it at three principal levels: global, state and sub-state. The global level reflects the international character of states’ activities; includes the global dependence of political decision-making, in which international organizations, institutions and norms reduce the anarchy of political decision-making in the country; is formed under the influence of the building and distribution of states and international system images. The state-level reflects the degree of unity that is achieved with the joint participation of both the state and the entire national community of people in political decision-making and in responding to the challenge posed by the international environment. Not only the state level, which considers the attributes of the state as a system of different institutions with their peculiarities of political decision-making, should be distinguished, but also the sub-state level, in which the interaction of social, including individual, and state actors in the process of political decision-making takes place. The issues of population mobilization in the course of implementing a political decision in the Ukrainian context are determined as the presence of various domestic «obstacles» to the implementation of those initiatives that come from the state or public structures. The authors distinguish the most important of them: the bureaucratic nature and corruption of the implementation process of public initiatives in political, social or economic spheres; low political diversity, lack of political party representation in parliament and low functional «maturity» of the legislative branch; an underdeveloped political culture of participation creates burdens when making a political decision since the political system lacks information at its «entrance»; socio-economic problems of the majority of the population that prevent it from responding to political initiatives


2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-55
Author(s):  
Dorothée Cambou

With a focus on the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination, and an eye on Arctic practices, this article analyses the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination and its exercise at the intergovernmental level. While the exercise of self-determination necessarily implies the right of indigenous peoples to autonomy in their internal and local matters and their involvement in decision-making at the state level, this article argues that self-determination additionally includes the right of indigenous peoples to be represented and to participate in the international arena: the intergovernmental aspect of self-determination. Although this analysis determines that it is yet too early to indicate the existence of a fully-fledged right, this article also evidences that there is a new policy goal at the un level, accompanied by practices at the arctic regional level, which could support the emergence of such a right in the future.


Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Karen Kunz ◽  
Carrie M Staton

As the 113th Congress begins to tackle the issues of the day, men and women alike celebrate the inclusion of a record number of women representatives. The historic numbers indicate progress, but the reality is that women compose slightly more than half of the national population but less than twenty percent of the national legislative representatives. Women fare slightly better at the state level, holding just under a quarter of state legislative seats and executive offices. In this study we explore the challenges faced and advances made by women in attaining statewide executive office in rural states by examining how they have fared in Appalachia and particularly West Virginia. We integrate theoretical understandings and statistical data with lived experiences gleaned from personal interviews conducted with the women who have held executive office in West Virginia.


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