The Dynamics of State Policy Liberalism, 1936–2014

By Devin Caughey, Christopher Warshaw. 2016

203 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Applying a dynamic latent-variable model to data on 148 policies collected over eight decades (1936-2014), we produce the first yearly measure of the policy liberalism of U.S. states. Our dynamic measure of state policy liberalism marks an important advance over existing measures, almost all of which are purely cross-sectional and thus cannot be used to study policy change. We find that, in the aggregate, the policy liberalism of U.S. states steadily increased between the 1930s and 1970s and then largely plateaued. The policy liberalism of most states has remained stable in relative terms, though several states have shifted considerably over time. We also find surprisingly little evidence of multidimensionality in state policy outputs. Our new estimates of state policy liberalism have broad application to the study of political development, representation, accountability, and other important issues in political science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea40b4249a4d178308cae8984da1e28ebfeb882c

Citations in the corpus

• From the Bargaining Table to the Ballot Box: Political Effects of Right to Work Laws (2018, unknown): “…between state-level union membership and Democratic Presidential vote shares from 1980 to 2016 (1a), as well as a very strong positive correlation between union membership and a summary measure of state policy ideological liberalism (Caughey and Warshaw 2016) (1b).7 [Figure 1 about here.]”