“Lien On Me”: State Policy Innovation in Response to Paper Terrorism

Abstract

Within the current context of state governments searching for roles in the response to terrorism, we explore the nature of state policy response to recent domestic threats to government operations. We employ a general model of state diffusion of innovative policies in an effort to understand state adoption of laws against the use of frivolous liens. The use of such liens by right-wing Patriot groups grew in the 1990s, leading us to focus on key issues related to policy diffusion—the extent of the problem or threat, and the characteristics of regional response. To test specific hypotheses we use Event History Analysis on a state-level dataset from 1995 to 1999. Our results suggest that state adoption of lien laws is mostly driven by regional forces, including the regional threat posed by Patriot groups and the adoption of lien laws by other states in the region, rather than national forces or factors internal to a state. We conclude that previous research has been too limited in its conceptualization of regional influences and that these same forces will likely drive future state-level response to the threat of terrorism.