Introduction to Faith in State Legislatures

This chapter introduces the complex history of the founding of America. Colonization of the United States was fueled by European upheaval unleashed by the Protestant Reformation. Religion in part gave birth to the United States. However, keeping religion out of government is a central question inherent in the history and culture of the U.S. The relationship among faith, politics, and culture is explored and contributes to either the support of or opposition to social change in state legislatures.

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.

Menstrual irregularity as a biological limit to early pregnancy awareness

US state legislatures have proposed laws to prohibit abortion once the earliest embryonic electrical activity is detectable (fetal “heartbeat”). On average, this occurs roughly 6 wk after the last menstrual period. To be eligible for abortion, people must recognize pregnancy very early in gestation. The earliest symptom of pregnancy is a missed period, and irregular menstrual cycles—which occur frequently—can delay pregnancy detection past the point of fetal cardiac activity. In our analysis of 1.6 million prospectively recorded menstrual cycles, cycle irregularity was more common among young women, Hispanic women, and women with common health conditions, such as diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome. These groups face physiological limitations in detecting pregnancy before fetal cardiac activity. Restriction of abortion this early in gestation differentially affects specific population subgroups, for reasons outside of individual control.

City vs. State

This chapter considers how city lobbying affects the overall policy environment from the perspective of the state. While results at the city level suggest that there are individual winners and losers from the lobbying process, this chapter shows how aggregate lobbying trends can systematically bias state transfers toward the interests of high-income cities, making them less progressive on average. At the same time, local officials don’t lobby for funding alone. Through a series of short case studies, this chapter also examines how the lobbying efforts of cities are shaping current policy debates in state legislatures, including preemption battles over minimum wage laws. While difficult to quantify the effects of these activities, taking a more holistic view of city lobbying paints a more nuanced and positive picture about its policy consequences.

When Cities Lobby

When Cities Lobby tells the story of what happens when city officials rely on professional lobbyists to represent their interests in state government. In a political environment characterized by intense urban-rural polarization and growing hostility between cities and state legislatures, the ability to lobby can be a powerful tool for city leaders seeking to amplify their voices in state politics. The cities that lobby at the highest rates include large urban centers that have been historically underrepresented in our federal system—and, increasingly, blue-leaning cities engaged in preemption battles against Republican-led legislatures. But high-income places have also figured out how to strategically use lobbyists, and these communities have become particularly adept at lobbying to secure additional grant money and shift state funding in a direction that favors them. How did we end up with a system where political officials in different levels of government often choose to pay lobbyists to facilitate communication between them, and are the potential benefits worth the costs? When Cities Lobby demonstrates that the answer is deeply rooted in both the nature of the federal system and the evolution of the professional lobbying industry. And while some states have recently debated measures to restrict lobbying by local governments, these efforts will likely do more harm than good in the absence of structural reforms to the lobbying industry more broadly.

US reforms on sexual harassment will be patchy

Significance It is illegal for an employer to allow sexual harassment in the workplace, and federal and state legislatures face rising pressure to curb it in workplaces, colleges and their own chambers. Social media platforms, the main location of sexual harassment, are failing to stop it. Impacts The 'metaverse' of virtual and augmented reality will have potential to escalate online sexual harassment to new levels. Addressing online sexual harassment under the same criminal laws as physical sexual assault, or as a hate crime, is a remote prospect. Courts will expand the definition of where intent to threaten someone encroaches on online free speech.

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.

Umpiring and Gerrymandering

In the United States, the growth of judicial power started as a way to curb over-reaching, sometimes corrupt, state legislatures and manifested itself in allowing the judicial branch, as opposed to the other branches, to resolve more disputes over contracts, property, debts, and other distinctly nineteenth-century problems. For the last seventy-five years or so, however, something else has propelled its influence: the growth of constitutional review at the federal level, the power to invalidate state and federal civil laws and executive branch actions as well as state and federal criminal prosecutions. This chapter discusses what has become an acutely American dilemma, a fear that the courts will do too little in enforcing constitutional rights and a fear they will do too much. It considers the problems posed in each direction and the risks of politicizing the federal courts if they become the exclusive source of identifying constitutional individual and structural rights.

State Legislatures and Distrust

This chapter explains the myriad restrictions that state constitutions place on state legislatures—such as single-subject rules, clear-title, and public-purpose clauses—and the kinds of problems that prompted them. The clear-title rule requires the subject of each bill to be expressed plainly in its title. The single-subject requirement ensures that each bill enacted by the legislature contains just one subject. The original-purpose requirement requires a final bill to line up with the stated purpose of the original bill. These limitations grew naturally out of a preoccupation of the Jacksonian era, curbing special interests. The US Constitution does not place comparable restrictions on Congress.

Membership, Mobilization, and Policy Adoption in the Gilded Age: The Case of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union

Relatively little is known about how late nineteenth-century associations worked to get their policy goals adopted by state governments. We study this question here, considering the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and three policies it supported: scientific temperance instruction, increasing the age of consent, and prohibiting tobacco sales to minors. Overall, WCTU-supported legislation was more likely to succeed in states with unified Republican state legislatures, aided by neighboring state adoptions (scientific temperance) and greater WCTU membership (increasing age of consent and prohibiting tobacco sales to minors). These findings are supported by historical evidence, which reveals how WCTU leadership targeted particular states when lobbying for scientific temperance instruction laws and utilized its broad membership base to pressure state legislatures on the other two issues. In total, these results show how one late nineteenth-century membership group was able to facilitate the successful spread of its policies throughout the nation.