Laboratories of Politics: There is Bottom-up Diffusion of Policy Attention in the American Federal System

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211068059
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(1) 29–43

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129211068059

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Laboratories of Politics: There is

Bottom-up Diffusion of Policy Attention in

the American Federal System

Alex Garlick

1



Abstract

A persistent question in the study of American federalism is if the states actually serve as “laboratories of democracy”for

the country as a whole. I argue that political attention to policy areas can diffuse upwards, from state legislatures to

Congress. National and state legislators share a party brand and can learn from policy debates in other levels. In

particular, we should expect to see the diffusion of messaging legislation, or bills that were introduced without the

intention of becoming law, after members of Congress observe their political effects in the sta tes. Using an original

dataset of introduced bills in all 50 state legislatures in 22 policy areas since 1991 drawn from LexisNexis, I show a

positive association between changes in the number of state legislative bills introduced in 12 policy areas and the number

of Congressional bills introduced in the next session, which is taken as evidence of “bottom-up”diffusion. This re-

lationship is more prevalent between Republican state legislators and members of Congre ss, within state delegations, and

in issue areas where the interest group community lobbies before both the states and national government. To the extent

that states are laboratories for the nation, they may be political laboratories.

Keywords

state politics, text as data, policy, legislation, federalism

Americans have long believed in the promise of the states

serving as the “laboratories of democracy,”where lessons

from a state’s policy implementation could later benef‌it

the country at large. For example, President Barack

Obama said the ideas in the 2010 Affordable Care Act

(ACA) were from a 2006 Massachusetts law.

1

But the

ACA may be an exception to the rule, as scholars have

found scant evidence of bottom-up diffusion on

isolated policies (Weissert and Scheller, 2008;

Mossberger, 1999) or across the agenda (Lowery et al.,

2010).

While policy may not often travel up the federal ladder,

scholars have argued that attention to different policy

areas can diffuse upwards (Karch and Rosenthal, 2016;

Shipan and Volden, 2006). Even if a policy is not im-

plemented, legislators at one level can learn from the

political experience of their counterparts. The policy

debate in a different venue can reveal important political

information about public opinion, media coverage, and

interest group positions. For example, in 2013, the Ar-

kansas legislature overrode Gov. Mike Beebe’s(D) veto to

pass a “Heartbeat”bill that bans abortions after an ul-

trasound can detect a fetal heartbeat. Beebe had called the

bill “blatantly unconstitutional”

2

and federal courts

agreed, striking the bill down. Despite the legal opposition

to the bill, in the 2015 legislative sessions, heartbeat bills

were introduced in nine different states.

3

In 2017, Rep.

Steve King (R-IA) introduced the f‌irst heartbeat bill in the

U.S. House of Representatives,

4

and it has since been

introduced in each subsequent Congress. So while

heartbeat bills are not a successful policy experiment from

the states, they clearly have a political utility to national

actors.

I argue that conditions in the United States are ripe for

the vertical diffusion of attention, particularly in a bottom-

up fashion. National and state legislators share a “party

brand”consisting on positions on a host of issues and can

introduce bills to satisfy intense policy demanding interest

groups (Bawn et al., 2012), and focus media and public

1

Political Science, The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Alex Garlick, Political Science, The College of New Jersey, 2000

Pennington Road, Ewing, NJ 08628-0718, USA.

Email: garlicka@tcnj.edu