Article summary
Ranked societies where social hierarchy cleaves politics can lead to bureaucratic weakening. This article examines the post-Civil War American South.
Ranked societies where social hierarchy cleaves politics can lead to bureaucratic weakening. This article examines the post-Civil War American South.
New research finds that states with generous unemployment benefits reduce household borrowing during job loss. Using detailed state-level data, authors show lower benefit generosity increases debt levels significantly after job loss. Paradoxically, despite economic risks from high personal debt, voters support stronger safety nets in areas where credit substitutes for welfare protection.
Government procurement isn't always competitive. This research examines partisan favoritism in U.S. federal contracts during 2003-2015.
Primary elections are often criticized for distorting representation by letting unrepresentative actors nominate extremists. Advocates push reforms to broaden participation but evidence shows variable effects.
Racial identification often must be inferred from ecological data, a process that is vulnerable to bias and error. Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) greatly improves those inferences by combining surname and geographic demographic data, but the geographic unit used varies widely in practice and the trade-offs are not well quantified. This letter validates BISG on Georgia's voter file, compares geocoded and nongeocoded approaches, and introduces ZIP codes as an intermediate geography for BISG.
State governments, known as 'laboratories of democracy,' design policies but often face implementation gaps. Existing theories on policy learning fall short. This study examines why some states acknowledge failed juvenile justice policies while others do not.
This study introduces an automated, text-based method for measuring bureaucratic discretion and executive delegation in statutes, enabling large-scale empirical work on legal delegation across U.S. states. The approach draws on tools from computational linguistics to turn legislative language into measurable signals about who is empowered to act and how much detail lawmakers provide.
New research suggests that collective bargaining rights for teachers in U.S. states do not cause average increases in education funding.
This article documents African American state legislative representation in the modern South, starting with Leroy Johnson's 1962 Georgia Senate win.
Are you tired of static visualizations that hide the real story? Compositional variables—those parts adding up to a whole—are common in political science, but they often mask important dynamics. This article provides fresh strategies for analyzing them using time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) methods.
Recent U.S. election law reforms increase signature requirements for citizen-initiated ballot measures, reducing their frequency and success rates on Election Day.