Are Subnational Policymakers' Policy Preferences Nationalized? Evidence from Surveys of Township, Municipal, County, and State Officials

• Published date: 01 May 2023
• Author: Nathan Lee,Michelangelo Landgrave,Kirk Bansak
• Date: 01 May 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12383

441

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 48, 2, May 2023

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12383

NATHAN LEE

Rochester Institute of Technology

MICHELANGELO LANDGRAVE

University of Missouri

KIRK BANSAK

University of California, Berkeley

Are Subnational Policymakers’ Policy

Preferences Nationalized? Evidence

from Surveys of Township, Municipal,

County, and State Officials

An ongoing debate in American politics concerns the extent to which sub-

national politics has become “nationalized.” We advance this debate by collecting

issue- position data on four distinct policy topics from unprecedented national

surveys of public officials at both the local and state levels. We then combine

this survey data with precinct- level presidential vote- share data that is tabulated

to match the boundary of each survey respondent’s government jurisdiction. In

doing so, we demonstrate that national party sorting of subnational officials is

substantively and statistically significant across a range of issues with national

salience, that it is consistent across local and state levels of government and it

cannot be explained by the party sorting of constituents. These findings have

implications both for the scope of nationalization as well as its implications for

substantive representation.

Introduction

A hallmark debate in political science is the degree to which

subnational politics has become “nationalized” (Anzia 2021).

Historically, subnational politics was seen as insulated from national

party politics because of federalism (Peterson 1981) and jurisdic-

tional sorting (Tiebout 1956), among other factors. However, a

© 2022 The Authors. Legislative Studies Quarterly published by Wiley

Periodicals LLC on behalf of Washington University in St. Louis.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons

Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in

any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.