The United State: Nationalization and Its Consequences for State Legislatures

This research explores the relationship between nationalization and legislative behavior/legislative outcomes. Nationalization in this context refers to split-ticket voting between national and state offices (Hopkins 2018). I theorize that the extent to which a state is “nationalized” should have consequences for how legislators behave and how legislatures function. If legislators know they are evaluated by the same criteria as national representatives, they have electoral incentives to provide their constituents with the partisan cues that animate national politics. Preliminary analyses suggest that while nationalization does not appear to impact in-chamber behavior, it does have consequences for state policy outcomes.