Abstract
ObjectiveThe role of institutions in state politics has been recognized for decades. However, most of this research has evaluated the role of a single institution at a time, such as the role of the ballot initiative or legislative professionalism. Little is known about how institutions may have counterbalancing or reinforcing effects.MethodI propose evaluating institutions collectively much in the way that comparative politics scholars have evaluated the collective set of institutions that create levels of democracy.ResultsThrough an exploratory factor analysis, I find that state institutions can primarily be understood along two dimensions, accountability pressure and checks and balances. I use a Bayesian factor analysis of mixed data to generate institutional scores for all 50 states along both dimensions from 1975 to 2016.ConclusionTheses scores will be a resource to understand how a state`s collective institutional environment affects a wide variety of phenomena, from policy responsiveness to voter turnout or policy innovation.
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