The opinion-writing process is a vital yet understudied aspect of judicial decision making on state supreme courts. We argue that this process is influenced by the political context and particularly by institutional rules that serve to reactivate and reinforce divisions among justices, leading to less cooperation on the court. We test our theory with original data comprising all education cases decided from 1995 to 2005 in all 50 states and find evidence to support our theory. Specifically, we find that elections lead to fewer unanimous decisions and more separate written opinions, indicating that judicial elections may have a more pervasive effect on the daily work of these courts than previously thought.

We offer the first systematic assessment of the factors thought to account for the quality and prestige of public research universities in the United States. We take account, too, of those potential causal factors identified in both contemporary and early descriptive research on these institutions. Our findings indicate that attributes of universities and their states from the first half of the twentieth century as well as some of their contemporary attributes are powerful predictors of their success in National Research Council peer evaluations of their research programs. The results provide a foundation for efforts to account systematically for the research achievements of these universities and evidence on state public policy influences on those research achievements.

Local option sales taxes have become an important source of local revenue across the United States. Thirty-three of the 50 states have granted authorization to their counties or cities (or both) to levy local option sales taxes, and said taxes generated nearly $50 billion in 2005, which accounted for 11% of all local tax revenue nationwide. Even though local option sales taxes have significant impacts on a county's ability to fund programs and services, little has been written about the decisions of counties to place such taxes on the ballot. Using demographic, fiscal, and political variables, a model is developed that explains the decision to place a county transportation sales tax on the ballot. Modeling and analysis reveal that counties behave strategically as the impact of demographic, fiscal, and political factors on the decision to place a local option sales tax on the ballot is shaped by whether the county is making an initial attempt to adopt, a subsequent attempt to adopt after voter rejection, or a renewal attempt when an existing local option sales tax is nearing its sunset date.

I offer a novel way of documenting the flow of power between the state and federal governments. Rather than look at programs or expenditures, I examine the behavior of elected officials. Assuming that ambitious politicians gravitate toward the locus of political power, I track the flow of elected officials in the American federal system. Specifically, I look at the career paths of more than 12,000 individuals who served in the U.S. Congress between 1789 and 2012. By analyzing the movement of elected officials between the state and federal levels, I confirm the prevailing story line on the evolution of American federalism while generating a measure that can be used to assess the relative distribution of power in the system across time.

State legislatures have been extremely active in passing legislation relating to all facets of immigration policy over the last several years. In this article, I develop a framework that explains how party ideology, party control of the legislature, and electoral conditions affect the likelihood that a state legislature will adopt policies that increase immigration enforcement. I test my arguments using state immigration policy adoption data that span from 2005 to 2011. I find that conservative Republican state parties are more likely to pass legislation enhancing immigration enforcement—on the condition that the Republican Party controls the state's legislative institutions. However, the willingness of Republican-controlled legislatures to pass immigration reform is often tempered by electoral concerns. Republican-controlled legislatures in states where Latinos make up a large proportion of the electorate are significantly less likely to adopt new legislation that targets undocumented migrants. I argue that Republican support for increasing sanctions on undocumented migrants is eroded by the potential for an electoral backlash from Latino voters. Democratic-controlled legislatures are unlikely to pass legislation under any conditions. Ultimately, the observed pattern of policy adoption is the product of the trade-off between the state parties' ideologically driven policy goals and the electoral consequences associated with actually implementing immigration policies.