Volume 18, Issue 1

State officials have challenged a number of federal policies during the Trump administration. In this article, I chronicle and categorize the tools that states have employed in resisting federal policies and show that states have relied primarily on three tactics: filing lawsuits, declining participation in federal programs, and passing policies inconsistent with federal policies. I also explain why state resistance has become such a prominent feature of U.S. politics. State challenges to federal policies are rooted in part in competing partisan perspectives, whereby members of the minority party at the federal level launch challenges from state offices that they control. State challenges are also grounded in contrasting intergovernmental perspectives, in that state officials who lack meaningful input in the passage of federal policies seek to challenge and shape these polices after they are enacted. In general, state resistance to federal policies during the Trump administration reflects continuity with state activity during other recent administrations and in a way that signals the institutionalization of state resistance to federal directives.

Do judges selected by merit review commissions perform better than elected judges or those directly appointed by elected officials? This is a central question in both the academic study of state judicial institutions and the policy discourse about how to reform them. To address it, we take advantage of the variation in the means of the selection for trial court judges within Arizona, a state comprised of appointed, elected, and merit-selected trial court judges. This unique context allows us to use an objective measure of judicial performance – the reversal rate of trial court cases appealed to Arizona’s state appellate courts – to evaluate judges by their means of selection. We gather an original dataset on 2919 cases heard by 176 judges, estimating multivariate models that control for characteristics of cases and of judges. Overall, we find that elected judges have a lower reversal rate than merit-selected judges. Our findings question the conventional wisdom in the state courts literature in favor of merit selection and against judicial elections, and encourage further work on the effects of judges’ means of selection beyond state supreme courts to include state appellate and trial courts.

Widening, asymmetric polarization is evident in both the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. Recent work unveils a new dimension to this polarization story: newly elected Republican women are driving this polarization. Women are more likely to legislate on women’s issues than men, yet women’s shared interest in representing women doesn’t preclude their identity as partisans. In this article, we explore the effect of today’s political climate on state legislators’ policy representation of women’s issues. We ask what effect does gendered polarization have on women’s issues? To test this, we evaluate bill sponsorship in the states on the quintessential “women’s issue” of abortion. Our research design focuses on bill introductions and uses on an original dataset of pro- and anti-abortion rights bill introductions, which we analyze using an event count model. We find that overall polarization leads to the introduction of fewer restrictive abortion bills, but as polarization between women lawmakers grows, legislators are more likely to introduce anti-abortion rights legislation. Gender polarization has consequences on the types of bills legislators introduce and for how scholars should study polarization.

In the face of federal government intransigence, climate activists are looking to the local leaders to aggressively address climate change. While local politicians are limited in many respects, their control over land use and transportation policy provides them with powerful tools to reduce Americans’ reliance on cars–thereby decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. Using six years of novel elite survey data, we find that mayors are strongly committed to addressing climate change and reducing their communities’ reliance on cars. They are also supportive of some specific policies–including the construction of dense, multifamily housing and bicycle lanes–that would decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Other policy views, though, reveal that mayors do not consistently endorse evidence-based transportation policy practices that would make walking and cycling safe and attractive modes of transit. Insufficient knowledge, a lack of funding, partisan polarization, and public opposition all pose potent obstacles to mayors taking the lead on climate change.

Although local government is a rich, important arena for understanding politics, local politics presents a few challenges for understanding and participating in it. To better explore comparative urban politics, we turn to reddit, a social media, news, and discussion platform. We ask if city subreddits are places of discussion of local politics and what can we learn about the salience of local topics, and about local politics, from the content of these subreddits. Using visualization and text analysis, we find that city subreddits are indeed forums for political discussion, finding that approximately a quarter of the topics on city subreddits are political in nature. We observe that people discuss matters including, but not limited to, taxation, policing and crime, homelessness, and education. We conclude with areas for future study, including, most prominently, the rise of nationalized local politics, such as minimum wage increases and body cameras, increasingly discussed and organized on the national stage.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina led to substantial demographic changes in New Orleans. The city lost large numbers of its African American population and became more diverse with the arrival of more Latino migrants and more highly educated, affluent white newcomers. Demographic change has the potential to depress political trust, efficacy, and trust in others. In this essay, we show that more than 10 years after Katrina, neither white nor Black New Orleanians trust local or national government. Black residents, particularly Black women, are generally more distrustful of their neighbors, whites, Latinos, and newcomers in the city. White newcomers are more efficacious and trusting than pre-Katrina white residents. These findings provide more evidence for the thesis that race and place shape trust and that Katrina continues to have an impact on New Orleans in distinctly racialized ways.