Housing policy is one of the most important areas of local politics. Yet little is known about how local legislatures and executives make housing policy decisions and how their elections shape policy in this important realm. We leverage survey data, housing policy data, and a new data source of 13,645 city council elections and 2,725 mayoral elections in large cities in the United States and a regression discontinuity design to examine partisan divides in housing policy among the mass public as well as the im- pact of local leaders’ partisanship on housing policy. We provide robust evidence that electing mayors from different political parties shapes cities’ housing stock. Electing a Democrat as mayor leads to increased multi-family housing production. These effects are concentrated in cities where councils do not have power over zoning appeals. Over- all, our paper shows that politics influences local housing policy, and it contributes to a larger literature on local political economy.

The study of urban and local politics in the United States has long been hindered by a lack of centralized sources of election data. We introduce a new dataset of nearly 50,000 electoral contests that encompasses races for seven distinct local political offices in most large cities and counties in the U.S. over the last three decades. Our data provide partisan and demographic information about candidates in these races as well as vote outcomes. We demonstrate the utility of these data with three applications: the descriptive representation of women and race/ethnic groups among candidates and office-holders, the partisan nationalization of local contests, and the match between district partisanship and local politicians’ voting records in city councils. These applications demonstrate the power of our data for enabling the study of these phenomena across types of political office and over time. Together, our data provide myriad opportunities for future research on subnational politics and remove a significant barrier to the study of representation in local government.

In recent years, there has been a surge in the study of representation and elections in local politics. Scholars have made progress on many of the empirical barriers that stymied earlier researchers. As a result, the study of representation and elections in local politics has moved squarely into the center of American politics. The findings of recent research show that local politics is much more similar to other areas of American politics than previously believed. Scholars have showed that partisanship and ideology play important roles in local politics. Democratic elected officials take much more liberal positions, and enact more liberal policies, than Republican ones. As a result, despite the multitude of constraints on local governments, local policies in the modern era tend to largely reflect the partisan and ideological composition of their electorates.

County governments are a crucial component of the fabric of American democracy. Yet there has been almost no previous research on the policy effects of the partisan composition of county governments. Most counties in the United States have small legislatures, usually called commissions or councils, that set their budgets and other policies. In this study, we examine whether counties with Democratic legislators spend more than counties with Republican ones. We assemble an original dataset of over 8,800 elections in approximately 290 medium and large counties over the past 25 years. Based on a regression discontinuity design, we find that electing a Democratic legislator rather than a Republican one leads the average county to increase spending by about 5%. The effects are particularly large in counties with small legislatures. Overall, our findings contribute to a growing literature on the policy consequences of partisan control of state and local government. They show that the partisan selection of county legislators has important policy effects in county governments.

Does it matter for municipal fiscal policies which party controls the mayorship in municipal government? the bulk of the existing evidence says no. But there are a variety of theoretical reasons to believe that mayoral partisanship should affect municipal policy outcomes. In this paper, we re-examine this question using data on nearly 1000 elections in medium and large cities over the past 60 years. We find that mayoral partisanship has a significant impact on the size of municipal government. Overall, Democratic mayors spend more than Republican mayors. the bulk of this additional spending comes on roads, housing, libraries, and interest. We find a modest impact of mayoral partisanship on city tax levels. However, Democratic mayors issue substantially more debt than Republican ones. they also spend much more to service interest on debt. Our findings show that mayoral partisanship matters for city policy. Moreover, our findings add to a growing literature indicating that perhaps city politics is not as different from national politics as scholars had thought.

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Municipal governments play a vital role in American democracy, as well as in governments around the world. Despite this, little is known about the degree to which cities are responsive to the views of their citizens. In the past, the unavailability of data on the policy preferences of citizens at the municipal level has limited scholars' ability to study the responsiveness of municipal government. We overcome this problem by using recent advances in opinion estimation to measure the mean policy conservatism in every U.S. city and town with a population above 20,000 people. Despite the supposition in the literature that municipal politics are non-ideological, we find that the policies enacted by cities across a range of policy areas correspond with the liberal-conservative positions of citizens on national policy issues. In addition, we consider the influence of institutions, such as the presence of an elected mayor, the popular initiative, partisan elections, and term limits. Our results show that these institutions have little consistent impact on policy responsiveness in municipal government. these results demonstrate a robust role for citizen policy preferences in determining municipal policy outcomes, but cast doubt on the hypothesis that simple institutional reforms enhance responsiveness in municipal governments.

In a democracy, government policies should not just be correlated with citizens' preferences, but also respond dynamically to them. Using eight decades of data, we examine the magnitude, mechanisms, and moderators of dynamic responsiveness in the American states. We show that on both economic and (especially) social issues, the liberalism of state publics predicts future changes in state policy liberalism. Dynamic responsiveness is gradual, however; large policy shifts are the result of the cumulation of incremental responsiveness over many years. Partisan control of government mediates only a fraction of responsiveness, suggesting that, contrary to conventional wisdom, responsive- ness occurs mainly through the adaptation of incumbent officials. Dynamic responsiveness has increased over time but does not seem to be influenced by institutions such as direct democracy or campaign finance regulations. We conclude that our findings, though in some respects normatively ambiguous, on the whole paint a reassuring portrait of statehouse democracy.

Gerrymandering has a lengthy history in American politics. However, it has been challenging to measure the severity of gerrymandering or its effect on the political process. Recent work has overcome the first challenge by measuring the severity of partisan gerrymandering using the efficiency gap: the difference in the parties' wasted votes, divided by the total number of votes cast. In this paper, we examine the effect of an efficiency gap on the political process in the American states. We first show that partisan selection in state legislative elections has important effects on political outcomes at three levels of analysis: individual districts, legislative chambers, and states as a whole. We then examine the effects of the efficiency gap itself. We find that large efficiency gaps lead to large changes in the ideology of the median voter in the legislature. Perhaps more importantly, we find that large efficiency gaps have significant effects on state policy. Overall, these results suggest that partisan gerrymandering has major consequences not only for who wins elections, but for the political process as a whole.

How much does it matter whether Democrats or Republicans control the government? Unless the two parties converge completely, election outcomes should have some impact on policy, but the existing evidence for policy effects of party control is surprisingly weak and inconsistent. We bring clarity to this question, using regression-discontinuity and dynamic panel analyses to estimate the effects of party control of state legislatures and governorships on a new annual measure of state policy liberalism. We find that throughout the 1936--2014 period, electing Democrats has led to more liberal policies, but that in recent decades the policy effects of party control have approximately doubled in magnitude. We present evidence that this increase is at least partially explained by the ideological divergence of the parties' officeholders and electoral coalitions. At the same time, we also show that party effects remain substantively modest, paling relative to policy differences across states.

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.

Do voters hold candidates accountable for their ideological positions? Past work on this topic has focused almost exclusively on U.S. House elections. It typically finds that candidates pay an electoral penalty for ideological extremity. In this paper, we extend the study of accountability to a far wider range of offices. We use roll call voting and campaign finance receipts to measure ideological extremism and a difference-in-difference identification strategy to examine accountability across five different offices: U.S. House, U.S. Senate, governor, state house, and state senate. In every office, ideologically extreme candidates pay a penalty at the ballot But we find significant variation in the penalty for extremism across offices. The smallest penalty for extremism is in state house elections, where voters barely punish extremists, and the largest penalty is in gubernatorial elections, where candidates receive a 7-8% increase in vote share by moving halfway across the range of ideological positions in their party. Our results have implications for literatures on representation, accountability, congress, and state politics.

Using new data on roll-call votes and public opinion in U.S. state legislative districts, we explain how ideological polarization within districts can lead to legislative polarization. Many of the seemingly "moderate" districts in suburbs and smaller cities that switch hands between Democrats and Republicans are internally polarized. the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans within these districts is often greater than the distance between liberal cities and conservative rural areas. We present a theoretical model in which intra-district ideological polarization causes candidates to be uncertain about the ideological location of the median voter, thereby reducing their incentives for platform moderation. We then demonstrate that in otherwise identical districts, the difference in roll-call voting behavior between Democratic and Republican state legislators is a function of within-district ideological heterogeneity. Accounting for the subtleties of political geography can help explain the juxtaposition of a polarized legislature and a moderate mass public. Our analysis encourages skepticism about redistricting reforms that aim to cure polarization by creating more heterogeneous districts.

Primary voters are frequently characterized as an ideologically extreme subset of their party, and thus partially responsible for increasing party polarization in government. We combine administrative records on primary turnout with five recent surveys from 2008-2014. We find that primary voters are similar to rank and file voters in their party in terms of demographic attributes and policy attitudes. these similarities do not vary depending on the openness of the primary. Our results suggest that the composition of primary electorates does not exert a polarizing effect above what might arise from voters in the party as a whole.

The relationship between votes and seats in the legislature lies at the heart of democratic governance. However, there has been little previous work on the downstream effects of partisan gerrymandering on the health of political parties. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive examination of the impact of partisan advantage in the districting process on an array of downstream outcomes. We find that districting bias impedes numerous party functions at both the congressional and state house levels. Candidates are less likely to contest districts when their party is disadvantaged by a districting plan. Candidates that do choose to run are more likely to have weak resumes. Donors are less willing to contribute money. And ordinary voters are less apt to support the targeted party. These results suggest that gerrymandering has long-term effects on the health of the democratic process beyond simply costing or gaining parties seats in the legislature.

For five straight cycles (the 1970s through the 2010s), Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act dominated redistricting in states covered by the provision. In these states, district plans had to be precleared with federal authorities before they could be implemented. Preclearance was granted only if plans wouldn’t retrogress, that is, reduce minority representation. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, Section 5 is no longer operative. So what happened to minority representation in formerly covered states after Section 5’s protections were withdrawn? This article is the first to tackle this important question. We examine all states’ district plans before and after the 2020 round of redistricting at the congressional, state senate, and state house levels. Our primary finding is that there was little retrogression in formerly covered states. In sum, the number of minority ability districts in these states actually rose slightly. We also show that formerly covered states were largely indistinguishable from formerly uncovered states in terms of retrogression. If anything, states unaffected by Shelby County retrogressed marginally more than did states impacted by the ruling. Lastly, we begin to probe some of the factors that might explain this surprising pattern. One possible explanation is the status quo bias of many mapmakers, which is reflected in their tendency to keep minority representation constant. Another potential driver is many line-drawers’ reluctance to use retrogression as a partisan weapon. This reluctance is evident in the similar records of all redistricting authorities with respect to retrogression, as well as in the absence of any relationship between retrogression and change in plans’ partisan performance.

This article provides an overview of the new Congressional and state legislative districtsthat were drawn around the country during the 2021-22 redistricting cycle. We provide background on the redistricting landscape, most notably the changing Federal role in both partisan and minority representation. We also discuss the process used to draw the new districts in each state. We then provide an empirical look at partisan fairness, competiveness, and minority representation in the new plans. We find that both parties have enacted increasingly extreme partisan gerrymanders when they control the redistricting process. The combination of Republicans’ control of the redistricting process in far more states than Democrats and the inefficient concentration of Democrats in cities has enabled Republciansto largely maintain an advantage in the translation of votes to seats in both Congress andmany state legislatures. As a result, the policymaking process in many states will continue to be skewed in a conservative direction. At the same time, nonpartisan Commissions appear to offer a consistent means to produce less biased and more competitive maps than when parties drawn the lines. Finally, while Black and Latino representation has improved in some places, both groups of voters remain underrepresented. We conclude by discussing lessons for both scholars and advocates.

The relationship between votes and seats in the legislature lies at the heart of democratic governance. However, there has been little previous work on the downstream effects of partisan gerrymandering on the health of political parties. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive examination of the impact of partisan advantage in the districting process on an array of downstream outcomes. We find that districting bias impedes numerous party functions at both the congressional and state house levels. Candidates are less likely to contest districts when their party is disadvantaged by a districting plan. Candidates that do choose to run are more likely to have weak resumes. Donors are less willing to contribute money. And ordinary voters are less apt to support the targeted party. These results suggest that gerrymandering has long-term effects on the health of the democratic process beyond simply costing or gaining parties seats in the legislature.

Gerrymandering has a lengthy history in American politics. However, it has been challenging to measure the severity of gerrymandering or its effect on the political process. Recent work has overcome the first challenge by measuring the severity of partisan gerrymandering using the efficiency gap: the difference in the parties' wasted votes, divided by the total number of votes cast. In this paper, we examine the effect of an efficiency gap on the political process in the American states. We first show that partisan selection in state legislative elections has important effects on political outcomes at three levels of analysis: individual districts, legislative chambers, and states as a whole. We then examine the effects of the efficiency gap itself. We find that large efficiency gaps lead to large changes in the ideology of the median voter in the legislature. Perhaps more importantly, we find that large efficiency gaps have significant effects on state policy. Overall, these results suggest that partisan gerrymandering has major consequences not only for who wins elections, but for the political process as a whole.

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the effect of Fox News Channel (FNC) on elections in the United States. FNC is the highest-rated channel on cable television and has a documented conservative slant. We show that FNC has helped Republican candidates in elections across levels of U.S. government over the past decade. A one standard deviation decrease in FNC’s channel position boosted Republican vote shares by at least .5 percentage points in recent presidential, Senate, House and gubernato- rial elections. The effects of FNC increased steadily between 2004 and 2016 and then plateaued. Survey-based evidence suggests that FNC affects elections by shifting the political preferences of Americans to the right. Overall, the findings suggest that FNC has contributed to the nationalization of United States elections.

We provide a comprehensive assessment of the impact of television advertising on United States election outcomes from 2000-2018. We expand on previous research by including presidential, Senate, House, gubernatorial, Attorney General, and state Treasurer elections and using both difference-in-differences and border-discontinuity research designs to help identify the causal effect of advertising. We find that televised broadcast campaign advertising matters up and down the ballot, but it has much larger effects in down-ballot elections than in presidential elections. Using survey and voter registration data from multiple election cycles, we also show that the primary mechanism for ad effects is persuasion, not the mobilization of partisans. Our results have implications for the study of campaigns and elections as well as voter decision-making and information-processing.

Between early March and August 1 2020, COVID-19 took the lives of over 150,000 Americans. Here, we examine the political consequences of the COVID-19 epidemic using granular data on COVID-19 fatalities and the attitudes of the American public. We find that COVID-19 has led to significant damage for President Trump and other Republican candidates. States and local areas with higher levels of COVID-19 fatalities are less likely to support President Trump and Republican candidates for House and Senate. Our results show that President Trump and other Republican candidates would benefit electorally from a reduction in COVID-19 fatalities. This implies that a greater emphasis on social distancing, masks, and other mitigation strategies would benefit the president and his allies.

Do citizens hold congressional candidates accountable for their policy positions? Recent studies reach different conclusions on this important question. In line with the predictions of spatial voting theory, a number of recent survey-based studies have found reassuring evidence that voters choose the candidate with the most spatially proximate policy positions. In contrast, most electoral studies find that candidates' ideological moderation has only a small association with vote margins, especially in the modern, polarized Congress. We bring clarity to these discordant findings using the largest dataset to date of voting behavior in congressional elections. We find that the ideological positions of congressional candidates have only a small association with citizens' voting behavior. Instead, citizens cast their votes ``as if'' based on proximity to parties rather than individual candidates. the modest degree of spatial voting in recent Congressional elections may help explain the polarization and lack of responsiveness in the contemporary Congress.

Retrospective voting is a crucial component of democratic accountability. A large literature on retrospective voting in the United States finds that the president's party is rewarded in presidential elections for strong economic performance and punished for weak performance. In contrast, there is no clear consensus about whether politicians are held accountable for the local economy at other levels of government. In this study, we use administrative data on county-level economic conditions from 1969-2018 and election results across multiple levels of government to examine the effect of the local economy on elections for local, state, and federal offices in the United States. We find that the president's party is held accountable for economic performance across nearly all levels of government. We also find that incumbents are held accountable for the economy in U.S. House and gubernatorial elections. Our findings have broad implications for literatures on representation, accountability, and elections.

Do voters hold candidates accountable for their ideological positions? Past work on this topic has focused almost exclusively on U.S. House elections. It typically finds that candidates pay an electoral penalty for ideological extremity. In this paper, we extend the study of accountability to a far wider range of offices. We use roll call voting and campaign finance receipts to measure ideological extremism and a difference-in-difference identification strategy to examine accountability across five different offices: U.S. House, U.S. Senate, governor, state house, and state senate. In every office, ideologically extreme candidates pay a penalty at the ballot But we find significant variation in the penalty for extremism across offices. The smallest penalty for extremism is in state house elections, where voters barely punish extremists, and the largest penalty is in gubernatorial elections, where candidates receive a 7-8% increase in vote share by moving halfway across the range of ideological positions in their party. Our results have implications for literatures on representation, accountability, congress, and state politics.

Moderates are often forgotten in modern research on American voters. To theextent that moderates have been studied, scholars have claimed that they’re actuallycloseted partisans or conflicted extremists. We utilize survey data on tens of thousandsof people across dozens of different policy areas to study and understand moderates.We develop a method to distinguish between genuine moderate, conflicted extremists,and people who don’t pay attention in surveys. Despite widespread claims about pub-lic polarization and hyper-partisanship, there appears to be a unimodal distribution ofpublic policy positions with a large share of individuals close to the median. Further-more, most of the people who appear to be moderate (i.e., giving a mix of liberal andconservative answers to policy questions), seem to be genuinely moderate (i.e., they’reclose to the center, issue-by-issue). Furthermore, genuine moderates are an important,politically consequential group that pays attention, votes, and largely determines therelative success of the parties across different elections

We develop the first cross-nationally comparable, survey-based measures of policy ideology in the European mass public. Our estimates cover eighteen Western European countries across thirty-three years and three policy domains: economic, social/postmaterial, and immigration/nationalism. We construct them using over one million individual survey responses and a Bayesian group-level IRT model. We show that political conflict in Europe now takes place across three distinct (but correlated) dimensions, and that ideologies have become polarized by region. Northern European countries are generally more conservative economically, but more liberal on social issues and immigration, while Southern European countries are the opposite. Over time, almost all countries have become more liberal on social issues, but Northern countries have done so much faster, while ideology on the economic and immigration domains has changed more slowly. Our new measures will enable scholars to address a wide variety of questions on democratic politics in Western Europe.

Until recently, the study of representation at the subnational level was hobbled by the lack of high-quality information about public opinion. The advent of new data sources, however, as well as of new methods such as multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP), has greatly enhanced scholars' capacity to describe public opinion in states, legislative districts, cities, and other subnational units. These advances in measurement have in turn revolutionized the study of subnational representation. In this article, we summarize new approaches to the measurement of subnational opinion. We then review recent developments in the study of the role of subnational public opinion in the political process and discuss potentially fruitful avenues for future research.

Since the mid-20th century, elite political behavior has increasingly nationalized. In Congress, for example, within-party geographic cleavages have declined, roll-call voting has become increasingly one-dimensional, and Democrats and Republicans have diverged along this main dimension of national partisan conflict. The existing liter- ature finds that citizens have displayed only a delayed and attenuated echo of elite trends. We show, however, that a different picture emerges if we focus not on individual citizens but on the aggregate characteristics of geographic constituencies. Using biennial estimates of the economic, racial, and social policy liberalism of the average Democrat and Republican in each state over the last six decades, we demonstrate a surprisingly close correspondence between mass and elite trends. Specifically, we find that: (1) ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans has increased dramatically within each domain, just as it has in Congress; (2) ideological variation across state-party publics is now almost completely explained by party rather than state, closely tracking trends in the Senate, and finally, (3) economic, racial, and social liberalism have become highly correlated across state-party publics, just as they have across members of Congress. Overall, our findings contradict the previous consensus that polarization in Congress has proceeded much more rapidly than polarization in the mass public.

Primary voters are frequently characterized as an ideologically extreme subset of their party, and thus partially responsible for increasing party polarization in government. We combine administrative records on primary turnout with five recent surveys from 2008-2014. We find that primary voters are similar to rank and file voters in their party in terms of demographic attributes and policy attitudes. these similarities do not vary depending on the openness of the primary. Our results suggest that the composition of primary electorates does not exert a polarizing effect above what might arise from voters in the party as a whole.

Over the past decade, a number of new measures have been developed that attempt to capture the political orientation of both incumbent and non-incumbent candidates for Congress, as well as other offices, on the same scale. these measures pose the tantalizing possibility of being able to answer a host of fundamental questions about political accountability and representation. In this paper, we examine the properties of six recent measures of candidates' political orientations in different domains. While these measures are commonly viewed as proxies for ideology, each involves very different choices, incentives, and contexts. Indeed, we show that there is only a weak relationship between these measures within party. this suggests that these measures are capturing domain-specific factors rather than just candidates' ideology. Moreover, these measures do poorly at distinguishing between moderate and extreme roll call voting records within each party. As a result, they fall short when it comes to facilitating empirical analysis of theories of accountability and representation in Congress. Overall, our findings suggest that future research should leverage the conceptual and empirical variation across these measures rather than assuming they are all synonymous with candidates' ideology.

Over the past eight decades, millions of people have been surveyed on their political opinions. Until recently, however, polls rarely included enough questions in a given domain to apply scaling techniques such as IRT models at the individual level, preventing scholars from taking full advantage of historical survey data. To address this problem, we develop a Bayesian group-level IRT approach that models latent traits at the level of demographic and/or geographic groups rather than individuals. We use a hierarchical model to borrow strength cross-sectionally and dynamic linear models to do so across time. the group-level estimates can be weighted to generate estimates for geographic units. this framework opens up vast new areas of research on historical public opinion, especially at the subnational level. We illustrate this potential by estimating the average policy liberalism of citizens in each U.S. state in each year between 1972 and 2012.

Inattentive and distracted respondents are increasingly a concern for survey researchers. Respondent inattention introduces noise into data sets, weakening correlations between items and increasing the likelihood of null findings. Instructional Manipulation Checks, or `Screeners', have recently been proposed as a way to identify inattentive respondents, but questions remain regarding their implementation. First, what is the optimal number of Screeners for identifying inattentive respondents? Second, what types of Screener questions best capture inattention? In this note, we address both of these questions. Using item-response theory to aggregate individual Screeners we find that four Screeners are sufficient to identify inattentive respondents. Moreover, two grid and two multiple choice questions work well. Our findings have broad relevance for applied survey research in political science and other disciplines. Most importantly, our recommendations enable the standardization of Screeners on future surveys.

In the United States, state governments have been the locus of action for addressing climate change in the face of federal stalemate. But there is no comprehensive index of the stringency of state policies to mitigate climate change. In this paper, we aggregate information from over 20 individual policies to develop a holistic index of state clean-energy policies from 1999-2019. We find that the average stringency of state clean-energy policies has increased substantially over the past two decades. We show that Democratic control of state government leads to more stringent clean-energy policies. Next, we examine the environmental consequences of state energy policies. We find that a standard-deviation increase in clean-energy policy stringency is in turn associated with a 9.5% reduction in CO2 emissions. While our results show that climate policy is associated with a measurable reduction in planet-warming CO2 emissions, the sum of states' efforts falls short of the scale of action needed to avoid irreparable damage to the earth's climate.

The public influences government policy primarily through elections. Elections affect policy largely by determining which party controls the government. We show that a majority of the public supports policies to protect the environment. But the environment is rarely the most important issue for voters, and thus the environment usually does not have a large impact in elections. Moreover, there are increasingly large divisions between Democrats and Republicans, which incentivizes politicians from both parties to embrace extreme positions. Democratic and Republican elected officials are increasingly polarized on environmental issues, with Democrats staking out much more liberal positions than Republicans in Congress. At the state level, Democratic control of legislatures and governorships leads to more stringent environmental policies. Democratic control of state government seems to have smaller effects, however, on environmental outcomes, such as air pollution emissions.

There is no consensus about whether exposure to a changing climate influences public concern about climate change. In this paper, we examine the link between climate change and public opinion using a comprehensive index of the mass public's latent concern about climate change in each state from 1999-2017. The index aggregates data from over 400,000 survey respondents in 170 polls. These new estimates of state-level climate concern enable us to exploit geographic variation in locally experienced climate changes over an extended time period. We show that climate concern peaked in 2000 and again in 2017. At the national level, trends in public opinion clearly mirror trends in temperature. Moreover, climate concern is modestly responsive to changes in state-level temperatures. Overall, our results suggest that continued increases in temperature are likely to cause public concern about climate change to grow in the future. But a warming climate, on its own, is unlikely to yield a consensus in the mass public about the threat posed by climate change.

The United States has often led the world in supporting renewable energy technologies at both the state and federal level. However, since 2011 several states have weakened their renewable energy policies. Public opinion will likely be crucial for determining whether states expand or contract their renewable energy policies in the future. Here we show that a majority of the public in most states supports renewable portfolio standards, which require a portion of the electricity mix to come from renewables. However, policy design and framing can strongly influence public support. Using a survey experiment, we show that effects of renewable portfolio standards bills on residential electricity costs, jobs and pollution, as well as bipartisan elite support, are all important drivers of public support. In many states, these bills' design and framing can push public opinion above or below majority support.

In the academic discussion of justiciability, conventional wisdom focuses on standing requirements as a barrier for environmental interests. As Justice Scalia famously asserted, corporations who are directly affected by a law's requirement or prohibition should have no trouble demonstrating standing, while environmental interests will generally find standing more difficult to establish. To investigate Scalia's claim, we developed a unique dataset that includes virtually every federal appellate case decided between 1976 and 2009 related to eight major environmental statutes. We find that Scalia's claim is wrong. Over the past thirty-four years, business and environmental plaintiffs were equally likely to have their claim dismissed because they lacked constitutional standing. Further, businesses were far more likely to have their claim dismissed because they lacked prudential standing under the zone of interest test. In our analysis we suggest that, although innovations in the early 1990's restricted standing for all plaintiffs, more recent changes in Supreme Court doctrine have made it easier for environmental interests to obtain standing while leaving in place the parts of the standing test that businesses found most difficult to overcome. In the end, we believe that the Supreme Court will eventually step-in to resolve the doctrinal ambiguity in standing law -- particularly for business plaintiffs seeking to challenge environmental regulations. there are a number of lessons from our analysis for progressive advocates. First, in the wake of the Supreme Court's Laidlaw decision in 2000 that relaxed standing rules for environmental plaintiffs, there is little practical risk that environmental advocates' claims will be dismissed due to lack of standing. Second, progressives should rigorously challenge the standing of business claims in the appellate courts since, contrary to conventional wisdom, many of these claims are vulnerable to both constitutional and prudential standing challenges. third, advocates should prepare for the virtually inevitable day that the Supreme Court steps in to clarify standing law for businesses. And finally, scholars should build upon the empirical approach in this article to develop new research agendas that evaluate the actual impact of Supreme Court doctrine on litigants.

We develop the first cross-nationally comparable, survey-based measures of policy ideology in the European mass public. Our estimates cover eighteen Western European countries across thirty-three years and three policy domains: economic, social/postmaterial, and immigration/nationalism. We construct them using over one million individual survey responses and a Bayesian group-level IRT model. We show that political conflict in Europe now takes place across three distinct (but correlated) dimensions, and that ideologies have become polarized by region. Northern European countries are generally more conservative economically, but more liberal on social issues and immigration, while Southern European countries are the opposite. Over time, almost all countries have become more liberal on social issues, but Northern countries have done so much faster, while ideology on the economic and immigration domains has changed more slowly. Our new measures will enable scholars to address a wide variety of questions on democratic politics in Western Europe.

For democracy to survive, it must be self-enforcing in the sense that all parties with the power to disrupt democracy -- such as an incumbent who may refuse to honor an electoral defeat or another group who might use force to take power -- choose not to do so, instead honoring the rules (Przeworski 2006, Weingast, 2008). Building on this perspective, we provide a new model of a self-enforcing constitution to address a series of questions: Why do some authoritarian regimes democratize while others remain stable? Why do some countries sustain stable democracy while others fail? How does constitutional design contribute to the emergence of self-enforcing democracy? With respect to the last question, we observe that many successful cases of democratization involved specific types of countermajoritarian features that constrain the power of elected majorities, such as malapportionment that benefits the old, authoritarian elite. We use this insight to build a formal model of democratization that shows how the presence of countermajoritarian institutions makes democracy more likely to occur, and more likely to survive.

What explains why countries decide to nationalize and privatize their oil industries? I find that fewer checks and balances make states more likely to expropriate investors by nationalizing their oil industry. However, this relationship is concentrated in the period prior to 1980. After 1980, there is no significant relationship between checks and balances and expropriation. this is likely due to the fact that almost every single oil-rich country with weak checks and balances had expropriated the bulk of the privately held oil assets in their countries by 1980. Moreover, democracies with strong checks and balances are more likely to privatize their national oil companies than autocracies with weak checks and balances. Taken as a whole, these findings highlight the crucial role of political institutions for influencing states' strategic choices in the oil sector.

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