Stalemate in the States: Negative Agenda Control, Veto Players, and Legislative Gridlock in the American States

Abstract

This paper examines how negative agenda control influences policy change in the American state legislatures, by conceptualizing of negative agenda control as the introduction of an additional player into a state legislature. In doing so, I use the logic of “absorption” detailed by Tsebelis (2002) to synthesize predictions generated by Cox and McCubbins (2005) and Krehbiel (1998) to show that negative agenda control increases legislative gridlock. More specifically, I argue and find: 1) that the largest distance between any two veto players in a political system (i.e., the size of the “core” of a political system) positively correlates with gridlock, and 2) even conditional on a state’s preference dispersion/polarization, negative agenda control drives policy change downward. To date, few studies have examined legislative gridlock in the American states, and even fewer have made use of prominent theories of policy change in the Congress and comparative legislatures literatures. This paper seeks not only to do just that, but also to suggest a means of synthesizing two major theories of policy change in American government using a prominent comparative theory of policy change (Tsebelis 2002). Finally, along the way, it also develops a new, easily calculable measure of bill “significance” at the state level (using ACA implementation bill counts from the National Council of State Legislatures), enabling it to add to previous studies by incorporating important differences between bills when assessing the magnitude of policy change.