Inter-party competition is an essential criterion for evaluating the quality of a democracy. American state politics scholars generally rely on two measures of competition: (1) Ranney's (1965, 1976) measure of the partisan composition of state legislatures and governors' offices and (2) Holbrook...

There is growing concern that the United States is an “unequal democracy” in terms of who exerts influence over the policy decisions made by elected officials. However, to date there have been few attempts to actually quantify the concept of unequal political representation. Moreover, we...

A large literature examines the connection between the size and scope of government in the industrial democracies and human well-being, and generally demonstrates that greater government intervention into the market economy promotes higher levels of life satisfaction. In this paper, we extend...

Do state governments respond to citizens as political equals when implementing public policies? Numerous studies have found that state policy outputs tend to be responsive to aggregated public opinion. I ask: Responsive to whom? Using three different measures of political representation –...