Institutional Design and Policy Responsiveness in US States

• Author: Scott J. LaCombe
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221135554
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2023, Vol. 51(2) 210–222

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221135554

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Institutional Design and Policy Responsiveness

in US States

Scott J. LaCombe

1



Abstract

There is signif‌icant disagreement on the moderating role of institutions on policy responsive- ness, yet overwhe lmingly research

in state politics has focused on single institutions. This project leverages a new aggregate scale of state institutions to evaluate if

the collective insti- tutional context moderates the inf‌luence of public opinion on policy. I use a recently released latent scale of

institutional context and f‌ind that high levels of accountability pressure strong ly strengthen public opinion’sinf‌luence on policy

for both economic and social policy, while the strength of a state’s checks and balance system is largely unrelated to policy

responsiveness. These results demonstrate the importance of incorporating aggregate institutional design into our under-

standing of the role of institutions in state politics, and that collectively institutions play a large role in determining how public

opinion is translated into policy.

Keywords

responsiveness, institutions, representation, states

Questions of policy responsiveness are central evaluating

democratic governance, as few would call a system demo-

cratic if policy was completely unrelated to public prefer-

ences. In the American context, there is a signif‌icant body of

research documenting a correlation between public opinion and

policy (Erikson et al., 1993;Caughey & Warshaw, 2018;Soroka

& Wlezien, 2010;Pacheco, 2013), but a robust debate on

whether responsiveness is largelyconstrainedtorespondingto

the preferences of the wealthy (Gilens, 2012), or that any re-

sponsiveness is largely an artifact of the voting based on partisan

identity, not policy preferences (Achen et al., 2017). This debate

has lead to increased research on the conditions when state

policy is more (or less) responsive to public preferences.

There has been extensive research on whether institutions

can affect the ways in which govern- ments respond to public

opinion (Gerber, 1996;Matsusaka, 2010;Lax & Phillips,

2012;Maestas, 2000;Pacheco, 2013), but the evidence is

decidedly mixed with some f‌inding that certain institu- tions

can moderate this relationship, and others f‌inding no effect.

The focus on specif‌ic institutional reforms, while important,

cannot evaluate how institutions f‌it together and inf‌luence

state politics. Individual institutions may have small effects

that are diff‌icult to consistently capture empirically, and in-

stitutions may have multiple effects that cancel each other

out. An indicator or single scale may be unable to identify

more complex institutional effects.

I propose scholars also use aggregate institutional mea-

sures to understand the role of insti- tutional context in state

politics. This approach mirrors comparative research that

argues single institutions are necessary but insuff‌icient alone

in measuring latent concepts such as democracy (Treier &

Jackman, 2008). A latent scale of institutions along shared

dimensions can incorpo- rate overlapping effects that insti-

tutions may share, and a dynamic measure of institutional

context ref‌lects the time-varying nature of institutional de-

sign. I argue this approach can help scholars understand the

largely unknown collective effect of institutions at the state

level.

I use a recently published measure of state institutional

context along two primary dimensions (LaCombe, 2021).

The f‌irst dimension, accountability pressure, represents

measures the extent to which states have institutions that

either incentivize responding to the median voter or provide

resources for state actors to learn about public opinion, in-

cluding an easy to use initiative process, high levels of

legislative professionalism, and relatively strict campaign

f‌inance rules. The second dimension, checks and balances,

measures the extent to which a state has power separated into

different branches of government versus concentrated in a

single, powerful branch. While there are clear reasons to

1

Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Scott J. LaCombe, Smith College, 201 Wright Hall, Northampton, MA

01063-0001, USA.

Email: lacombe129@gmail.com