State Legislative Process

This chapter explores the history and operation of state legislatures. The urban-rural divide characterizes stark political and social differences that fuel legislative behavior. The content of public policies across the United States is influenced by these divisions and contributes to either the support of or opposition to social change. State legislators are on the front lines of these geographic ideological divides. These variations by region contribute to the increase in single-party control and have generated pronounced policy differences.

The Use of Faith in Legislative Decision-Making

In recent decades, same-sex marriage has emerged as a national political issue. As a result, state legislators have sponsored and passed statutes on an array of issues directly related to this topic. This chapter investigates how faith influences an individual legislator's political judgment in the early stages of decision-making related to sponsored bills. The findings suggest that even while legislators' partisanship and ideology largely structure decision-making, conservative Protestant legislators are more likely to respond to threats by sponsoring a bill when issues involve morality.

Decomposing the source of the gender gap in legislative committee service: evidence from US states

Extensive research on gender and politics indicates that women legislators are more likely to serve on committees and sponsor bills related to so-called “women's issues.” However, it remains unclear whether this empirical regularity is driven by district preferences, differences in legislator backgrounds, or because gendered political processes shape and constrain the choices available to women once they are elected. We introduce expansive new data on over 25,000 US state legislators and an empirical strategy to causally isolate the different channels that might explain these gendered differences in legislator behavior. After accounting for district preferences with a difference-in-differences design and for candidate backgrounds via campaign fundraising data, we find that women are still more likely to serve on women's issues committees, although the gender gap in bill sponsorship decreases. These results shed new light on the mechanisms that lead men and women to focus on different policy areas as legislators.

The Relationship between Social Norms, Avoidance, Future Orientation, and Willingness to Engage in Climate Change Advocacy Communications

This study examined factors associated with willingness to engage in communication behaviors related to climate change advocacy. Data were collected as part of an online, longitudinal US study beginning in March 2020. Outcomes included willingness to post materials online, contact state legislators, and talk with peers about climate change. Covariates included climate change-related social norms, avoidance of climate change information, and perceptions of the future impact of climate change. A minority of the 586 respondents (23%) reported regular conversations about climate change, while approximately half of the respondents reported willingness to discuss climate change with peers (58%), post materials online (47%), and contact state legislators (46%). Strong predictors of willingness to engage in each climate change communications behaviors included climate change social norms, not avoiding climate change information, and believing that climate change will have a negative impact on the future. Findings indicate the importance of designing programs to foster increased climate change communications in order to promote community-level climate change advocacy norms.

Inter-Party Competition, Public Electoral Pressure, and Democratic Strength: Refining Political Explanations of Incarceration Trends in the U.S., 1980 – 2010

The purpose of this research is to advance the politics of mass imprisonment literature by testing and specifying the macro-explanations of the state-level incarceration change in the United States (U.S.) between 1980 and 2010. Specifically, I account for mechanisms of inter-party competition and public electoral pressure neglected in prior research. To accomplish this goal, I utilize random coefficient models designed to control for repeated annual measures of state-level data that overwhelm traditional analytic techniques. Findings suggest that violent crime, partisan affiliation of state legislators and governors, probation rates, citizen ideology, marijuana decriminalization, and recidivist-focused laws are associated with incarceration as hypothesized, as well as the African American presence net of crime and socioeconomic disadvantage. Contributing to the theoretical debates on democracy and punishment, this paper demonstrates that inter-party competition and public electoral pressure amplify incarceration in the context of Democratic Party dominance, where no liberalizing effects of competition were found. I conclude that legal and extralegal factors are associated with incarceration and suggest that the public did not oppose criminal justice expansion via democratic feedback mechanisms, so both penal populism (Pratt, 2008) and popular punitivism (Campbell et al., 2017) are valid interpretations of imprisonment politics during the analyzed period.

DIGITALNA IMOVINA U PRAVNOM SISTEMU SRBIJE: OSNOVNE KARAKTERISTIKE

Increased importance and availability of different forms of digital assets have resulted in an increased interest of state legislators around the globe for this type of application of modern technologies in the area of finance. Serbian law belongs to a small group of legal systems that already possess comprehensive regulation of digital assets. The main subject of this paper is the analysis of crucial characteristics of the Serbian legal regime of digital assets, with a short review of the solutions contained in the EU Proposal for a Regulation on Markets in Crypto-assets. The analysis has been conducted by determination of the most important characteristics of the Serbian Law on Digital Assets, considered to be the most relevant for its future implementation: 1) defining the main types of digital assets; 2) clear determination of the scope of application of the rules on digital assets; 3) comprehensive regulation of the entire market in digital assets through prescribing rules on the issuance and secondary trading of digital assets, as well as the rules on all market actors present in the digital assets market. A review of the main benefits and risks and problems concomitant to digital assets precedes the analysis of mentioned characteristics of digital assets.

Practice and Theory: The Diffusion of State Legislative Budget Reform

We question why some state legislatures responded to public discourse promptly while other state legislatures resist change. We use the choice of performance-based budgeting (PBB) to set the stage in answering this compelling question. We employ a logit model as a discrete event history analysis (EHA). We use the EHA to determine how and what variables influence the probability of an organization’s qualitative change (or “event”) at a given point in time. In this study, the organizations are states, and the event to be analyzed is the enactment of PBB law. Our data set is a modified panel of 50 states between the years 1993 and 2008. We study the factors that would influence state legislators to pass PBB laws across the nation. While our empirical result shows that political preferences are not statistically significant factors for states to pass PBB law, state legislators seem to favor the factors associated with the financial management explanation to adopt PBB. Also, the factors of path dependence and mimicking influence states to adopt PBB.

Costs and Consequences of Traffic Fines and Fees: A Case Study of Open Warrants in Las Vegas, Nevada

Traffic stops and tickets often have far-reaching consequences for poor and marginalized communities, yet resulting fines and fees increasingly fund local court systems. This paper critically explores who bears the brunt of traffic fines and fees in Nevada, historically one of the fastest growing and increasingly diverse states in the nation, and one of thirteen US states to prosecute minor traffic violations as criminal misdemeanors rather than civil infractions. Drawing on legislative histories, we find that state legislators in Nevada increased fines and fees to raise revenues. Using descriptive statistics to analyze the 2012–2020 open arrest warrants extracted from the Las Vegas Municipal Court, we find that 58.6% of all open warrants are from failure to pay tickets owing to administrative-related offenses—vehicle registration and maintenance, no license or plates, or no insurance. Those issued warrants for failure to pay are disproportionately for people who are Black and from the poorest areas in the region. Ultimately, the Nevada system of monetary traffic sanctions criminalizes poverty and reinforces racial disparities.

Personality and Its Partisan Political Correlates Predict U.S. State Differences in Covid-19 Policies and Mask Wearing Percentages

A central feature of the Covid-19 pandemic is state differences. Some state Governors closed all but essential businesses, others did not. In some states, most of the population wore face coverings when in public; in other states, <50% wore face coverings. According to journalists, these differences were symptomatic of a politically polarized America. The Big 5 personality factors also cluster at the state level. For example, residents of Utah score high on Conscientiousness and low on Neuroticism, whereas residents of Massachusetts and Connecticut show the opposite pattern. In state-level regressions that controlled for partisan political allegiances, Conscientiousness was a significant (negative) predictor of the stringency of state Covid-19 restrictions, whereas Openness was a significant (positive) predictor of mask wearing. A number of the predictors were strongly correlated with each other. For example, the correlation coefficient linking Openness with the percentage of Democratic state legislators was r = 0.53. Commonality regression partitions the explained variance between the amount that is unique to each predictor and the amount that is shared among subsets of correlated predictors. This approach revealed that the common variance shared by Conscientiousness, Openness and partisan politics accounted for 34% of the state differences in Covid-19 policy and 35% of the state differences in mask wearing. The results reflect the importance of personality in how Americans have responded to the Covid-19 pandemic.