The Role of State and National Institutional Evaluations in Fostering Collective Accountability Across the U.S. States

• Published date: 01 December 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129241265118
• Author: Carlos Algara,Alexander Specht
• Date: 01 December 2024

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(4) 1294–1313

© The Author(s) 2024

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/10659129241265118

journals.sagepub.com/home/prq

The Role of State and National Institutional

Evaluations in Fostering Collective

Accountability Across the U.S. States

Carlos Algara

1,

*and Alexander Specht

2,

*

Abstract

Theories of collective accountability in American elections center on the ability, and willingness, of voters to hold

legislators accountable for the job performance of the president and his party in Congress. While this work f‌inds that

legislators pay an electoral penalty for low institutional approval ratings under theirparty’s control, little is known

whether this form of collective accountability translates to the state legislative context. We argue that collective

accountability in state legislative elections follows a two-tiered approach, with state legisl ators being held accountable for

national and state policymaking institutions. Using new state-level measures of institutionalapproval for national and state

institutions, along with voter-level data from the 2007–2020 Cooperative Election Study, we f‌ind that presidential

approval is the principal growing motivator of state legislative partisan choice with other policymaking institutions playing

a minimal role, at best. These f‌indings suggest that the electoral fortune of state legislative candidates, and state parties,

are largely and increasingly determined by national forces outside of the purview of state-leve l policymaking institutions.

Keywords

collective accountability, state politics, presidential approval, gubernatorial approval, nationalizedelections

I’m looking at one of these campaigns where I hear Re-

publicans try to tie this guy running for State House to

Obama…I think that’s disingenuous when I hear that, I just

think what are you talking about here, apples and oranges

totally.

-U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR), 9/25/2012

1

On the heels of another challenging election cycle for

Arkansas Democrats, U.S. Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR)

lamented that state legislative elections were taking on an

increasingly nationalized tone. Following a challenging

2010 election cycle, which saw Arkansas Republicans

double their ranks in the State House from 28 to 46 and go

from 8 to 15 seats in the State Senate, Arkansas Democrats

braced for another challenging election cycle with

statewide unpopular Democratic President Barack Obama

at the top of the ticket in the 2012 elections. Aside from

their state legislative loses, Arkansas Democrats also

suffered substantial loses in statewide races for consti-

tutional off‌ices and in the congressional races during the

2010 election cycles. Punctuated by the unseating of Sen.

Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) by over twenty percentage

points by Rep. John Boozman (R-AR) and victories in

three out of four congressional districts, Arkansas Re-

publicans also won three out of seven statewide races for

constitutional off‌ice with victories in races for Lt. Gov-

ernor, Secretary of State, and Commissioner of Public

Lands.

2

Indeed, the 2010 election cycle saw the election

of Arkansas Republicans to the off‌ices of Secretary of

State and Commissioner of Public Lands for the f‌irst time

since Reconstruction. Congruently, the 2010 elections

also produced the f‌irst Republican majority in the con-

gressional delegation since Reconstruction. As a conse-

quence, while popular Democratic Governor Mike Beebe

1

Mary Toepelt Nicolai & George S. Blair Assistant Professor of Political

Science, Department of Politics & Government, Claremont Graduate

University, Claremont, CA, USA

2

Associate Director, Center for Business and Economic Analysis,

University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA

*Authors listed in alphabetical order and authorship is equal.

Corresponding Author:

Carlos Algara, Mary Toepelt Nicolai & George S. Blair Assistant

Professor of Political Science, Department of Politics & Government,

Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA 91711, USA.

Email: carlos.algara@cgu.edu

was re-elected by a strong 64–35 percent margin and

Democrats handily won races for State Auditor, Attorney

General, and State Treasurer, Arkansas Republicans were

successfully able to translate President Obama’s chronic

unpopularity to historic gains in what was, traditionally, a

staunchly Democratic state (Black and Black 2003).

3

Observing that Arkansas Republicans were national-

izing the 2012 state legislative elections, just like they had

in their successful 2010 election cycle, Sen. Pryor noted

that Republicans “try to tie this guy running for State

House to Obama”and suggested that an equivalence

between the President and Arkansas Democrats running

for the state legislature was a proposition akin to “com-

paring apples and oranges, totally.”Ultimately, Arkansas

Republicans would leverage the chronic unpopularity of

President Obama—who lost Arkansas to Fmr. Gov. Mitt

Romney (R-MA) by a 37–61 percent margin—in the state

to great effect as they gained f‌ive seats in the State House

and six seats in the State Senate during the 2012 state

legislative elections, enough for their f‌irst state legislative

majorities since reconstruction.

4

Adding insult to injury,

in the same election cycle, Arkansas Republicans won the

congressional seat left open by retiring Democratic

Rep. Mike Ross (AR-4) to control all state congressional

districts for the f‌irst time since Reconstruction for the

upcoming 113th Congress and leaving Sen. Pryor as the

last remaining Democrat in the congressional delegation.

In the subsequent 2014 election cycle, Arkansas Re-

publicans would complete the partisan realignment that

began in 2010 with Sen. Pryor himself losing re-election

to freshman Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR) by a robust 56–

39 percent and decisive victories in statewide open races

for Governor, State Auditor, Attorney General, and State

Treasurer.

5

It is clear through his observation of the forthcoming

2012 state legislative elections that Sen. Pryor both noted,and

anticipated, that presidential approval could make its way

down the ballot and manifest itself as the signif‌icant deter-

minant of state legislative outcomes across Arkansas. While

the preceding case study of Arkansas provides an interesting

case study into how presidential approval could be a focal

point in state legislative elections, a traditionally very local

electoral context, to date there is no model that considers how

all forms of institutional approval may inf‌luence state leg-

islative outcomes. While we qualitatively highlight the

dramatic example of Arkansas during the Obama adminis-

tration, standing models of collective accountability focusing

on the role of presidential perceptions at the state legislative

level omit the incorporation of other national- and state-level

institutions, such as perceptions of the U.S. Congress,

Governor, and state legislature. To thatpoint, the 2010 and

2012 election cycles saw state legislative Arkansas Demo-

crats weighed down by not only an unpopular Democratic

President, but also an unpopular Democratic Congress with

an approval rating of less than 20 percent heading into those

election cycles (Algara 2021b;Griff‌in2011).Moreover, there

is the possibility that while Arkansas Democrats suffered

stunning defeats in the State House and State Senate during

those two election cycles, their loses could be modestly

mitigated by a relatively popular Democratic Governor and

Democratic state legislature in power. Taken together, no

contemporary model assesses the role that state and national

institutional job evaluations play in shaping state legislative

outcomes.

In this article, we specify a model that state legislative

outcomes are motivated by state and national institutional

evaluations rather than solely on presidential evaluations.

While we argue that presidential job approval is the most

salient predictor of state legislative elections, we posit that

gubernatorial, congressional, and state legislative evalu-

ations also play a role in shaping these inherently local

contests for the state legislature. Drawing on new state-

level job approval measures of these state and national

policymaking institutions (i.e., presidential, gubernatorial,

congressional, and state legislative) and data on aggregate

state legislative turnover, we f‌ind strong evidence across

differing model specif‌ications that state legislative elec-

tions are almost entirely a referendum on presidential job

performance irrespective of state legislative chamber. We

replicate this f‌inding at the individual-level by f‌inding that

while only presidential approval and gubernatorial ap-

proval are consistent predictors of state legislative choice

by voters, collective accountability is overwhelmingly

channeled by presidential job evaluations. Moreover, we

f‌ind suggestive evidence that these presidential approval

effects on state legislative outcomes are growing over time

at both the aggregate and individual-level. Consequently,

we argue that the results of our unif‌ied collective ac-

countability model incorporating both state and national

institutional evaluations lends additional support to the

claim that even state legislative candidates running for an

inherently local legislative off‌ice cannot escape the

president-centered nationalization found in congressional

politics. As a result of this president-centered nationali-

zation at the local level, state legislative candidates cannot

rely on potentially more favorable congressional, gu-

bernatorial, and state legislative evaluations to insulate

them from potentially unfavorable presidential

evaluations.

Specifying a Model of State Legislative

Collective Accountability

State and National Executive Origins

of Accountability

The Link Between State/National Executive Evaluations and

Legislative Elections.The relationship between presidential

Algara and Specht1295