State Constitutional Amendment Research Articles

Dobbs, American Federalism, and State Abortion Policymaking: Restrictive Policies Alongside Expansion of Reproductive Rights

Abstract The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade shifted abortion-policy decision-making from the national level to the state level and opened the door for states to individually determine the level of protection for reproductive rights. We examine state actions following Dobbs and discuss the near-term implications of the decision for federalism and state governments. One effect of the Dobbs decision, evident in actions taken by some state legislatures, has been to open a window for states to enact laws imposing greater limits on reproductive options for women. However, another effect of Dobbs has been to create a greater demand for confirming and in some cases expanding reproductive rights, as seen by state constitutional amendments, supreme court decisions, and statutes protecting reproductive rights and safeguarding access to abortion services.

Essential internal control: evidence from the executive branch of the State of Ceará

PurposeThis article aims to identify management practices that evidence how internal control have been considered essential, from the edition of the State Constitutional Amendment no. 75 of 2012, within the public administration of the executive branch of the State of Ceará, during the period 2012–2021.Design/methodology/approachThe study relates the identified management practices to COSO (The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations) methodology “Internal Environment” component categories. The research is classified as basic, exploratory and bibliographic, on the theme of internal control in scientific articles published between 2015 and 2021, and documental, carried out through official documents, including the 27 Brazilian constitutions.FindingsExistence of management practices that corroborate the essentiality of internal control in Ceará.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is limited to evidencing the control practices implemented in Ceará, not evaluating them as to their quality.Practical implicationsContributions on control on constitutional-legal bases for other Brazilian Federation States.Social implicationsPossibility of introducing the research theme into various branches of scientific knowledge, such as political science and contributing to public organizations to implement policies with the proper application of resources for the benefit of society.Originality/valueThe originality of the research is in demonstrating the essentiality of internal control in the State of Ceará, from the edition of management acts performed by the executive branch, based on Constitutional Amendment 75 of 2012, which did not become a dead letter of the law, enabling other states of the federation to do the same.

US voter rights in translation

AbstractFelons’ voting rights have featured prominently in debates over voter suppression in theUnited States, particularly in Florida, where a 2018 state constitutional amendment reinstated voting rights to the state’s 1.4 million former felons (Robles 2018). Florida also has a high concentration of Spanish-speaking voters with Limited English Proficiency (LEP), making Spanish-language voting information crucial. Inadequate translations of voter information may misrepresent voter eligibility for LEP Spanish-speaking former felons in Florida. Using a parallel corpus, this article’s central research question investigates how semantic shifts occur in Spanish translations of “felony” and “felon” in online voter information for seven Florida counties. The results reveal a number of misrepresentative semantic shifts in both human- and machine-translated Spanish voter information. Such shifts may impinge on individuals’ constitutional rights.

Review: Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia, by Brent Tarter

Review: <i>Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia</i>, by Brent Tarter

From ’48 to ’68

In the 1996 case Romer V. Evans, the United States Supreme Court struck down a Colorado state constitutional amendment that had prohibited municipalities and local governments within the state from enacting ordinances grant- ing special treatment to“homosexual persons.”The Court deemed the initiative to have been driven by “animus” toward an identifiable minority class, i.e., those characterized as having or engaging in “homosexual, lesbian, bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships,” and thus ran afoul of the Equal Protection Clause found in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Social Media and Marriage Equality in Australia: The Media Roles in the Public Sphere and the Agenda-Setting

&lt;p align="justify"&gt;Marriage equality or the equal status of same-sex marriage has undergone a rather tough road in Australia, involving diverging opinions in parties at the state and federal levels and constitutional amendments. It appears that people in power set the agenda on the legalization of same-sex marriage. However, it cannot be denied that social media played an almost decisive role in this process because it enabled the gathering of massive public opinion to pressure the government to make changes. To be specific, social media or social networking sites offered platforms for people concerned to share reports about the progress of foreign countries in legalizing same-sex marriage, to express their opinions and to launch campaigns in support of their beliefs. This essay explores the role that social media played in the legalization of marriage equality movement in Australia from the perspectives of the public sphere theory and the agenda-setting theory.&lt;/p&gt;

Support for Progressive Reforms: Evidence from California’s 1911 Referenda

An analysis of county-level election results in a 1911 California special election in which voters considered multiple state constitutional amendments—women’s suffrage, direct democracy, home rule, worker safety, and business regulation—finds that certain socially active Protestant denominations endorsed most of these reforms. Otherwise, support for these measures showed little group uniformity. Urban counties favored several reforms but opposed women’s suffrage. Support in counties with greater wealth, a larger proportion of immigrants, and several other religious denominations extended to certain reforms but not to others. Although many leaders and chroniclers typically claimed Progressivism to comprise a coherent movement, empirical study challenges this interpretation by showing varied patterns of electoral support for Progressive reforms and a notable divergence in support for women’s suffrage.

An Alternative Route to Voting Reform: the Right to Vote, Voter Registration, Redistricting and U.S. State Constitutions

AbstractThe U.S. Constitution reserves to states the responsibility for regulating most aspects of elections. Recently, the Supreme Court has weakened the tools for federal officials to challenge state elections practices under the Voting Rights Act and signaled a great deal of deference to state authority over election law. As a result, state legislatures’ latitude to regulate elections is constrained primarily by state constitutions. With voter ID laws and partisan gerrymandering commanding considerable attention in recent years, it is important to investigate the importance of state constitutions in this area. In this article, we discuss recent efforts by voting and election reformers to utilize state constitutions to challenge restrictive voting laws and partisan gerrymandering, whether by enacting state constitutional amendments or relying on state constitutional provisions in state court litigation. We also highlight the diverse and often underappreciated landscape of voting and election laws in the states and the resources available to reformers at the state level by analyzing state constitutional provisions bearing on the right to vote, voter registration, and redistricting.

Extra, Extra, (Don't) Roll-off about It! Newspaper Endorsements for Ballot Measures

AbstractVoters often have difficulty making choices on the myriad state constitutional amendments they vote on each year. Without partisan cues, they turn to other sources for these low-salience, high complexity measures. One such source is newspaper endorsements. In this article, we look at newspaper endorsements of ballot measures in Florida over 20 years both on “no” votes and roll-off. We argue that endorsements' effect on “no” votes and roll-off differs in ways not previously appreciated. Newspaper endorsements have a positive impact on no votes, as expected from the information theory of voter participation. Endorsements have little impact on roll-off, which we posit is because roll-off voters are not likely to seek information from newspapers. Thus, newspaper endorsements serve to persuade, but not entice, voters to vote for ballot measures.

An Investigation into the Potential Impact of Carve-Outs for Ranching and Farming Protections Through State Constitutional Amendments

In recent years, a number of states have sought to amend their constitutions to provide special protections against legislative enactments which may impinge on “ranching and farming” activities. In fact, North Dakota and Missouri have already amended their state constitutions to guarantee the rights of ranchers and farmers to engage in their current practices as well as in unforeseeable technically enhanced practices with unknown ramifications. In Indiana, the Senate considered amending its state constitution to protect the “right to farm and ranch” in 2015, but declined to do so. More recently in 2016, Oklahoma State Senator Scott Biggs used similar language that provided special protections for these carved-out activities in a proposed constitutional amendment that was placed on the November ballot. The voters defeated the proposal. Nebraska expects to introduce a similar measure in 2017, after Senator John Kuehn, the measure’s sponsor, moved to delay the measure during the final weeks of the 2016 legislative session because some legislators, including one who removed her name as co-sponsor before the debate began, felt that there was too little information about how these constitutional amendments work and whether they are needed in the first place. Nonetheless, there’s no reason to think that other states, particularly states like North Carolina, which harbors the largest hog slaughtering plant in the world, won’t soon be seeking to adopt these same types of amendments to their state constitutions. Several questions come to mind when scrutinizing these proposed constitutional amendments. Who qualifies as a “rancher” or “farmer”? Why grant special status to ranching and farming as opposed to any other business or industry? How are these proposed constitutional amendments different from the “Right to Farm” statutes that all fifty states have on the books that protect farmers and ranchers from nuisance lawsuits? What probable effects will propositions like these have on the interests of parties other than those of ranchers and farmers? What are the vices and virtues of the potential impacts of “Right to Farm” amendments upon anticipated regulatory issues that may arise, as follows: animal cruelty; environmental damage; human nutrition and food safety; and business interests. This Note concludes that the “ranchers and farmers” benefited by these propositions are not individual, family, or organic farmers, but animal agricultural giants who operate intensive industrial factory farms and slaughterhouses. State laws already provide many agribusiness protections, and agribusiness activities have significant and detrimental effects on animal treatment; the planet’s health; human nutrition and food safety; and alternative food production and associated businesses. This Note investigates: Is it reasonable to create additional rights for ranchers and farmers through state constitutional amendments?

Moves and Countermoves: Countermovement Diffusion of State Constitutional Amendments

Policy diffusion literature generally studies the adoption of similar policies across jurisdictions, but often overlooks how opposing policies or legal constraints may influence the enactment of rigid state constitutional amendments. The current study models the spread of state constitutional amendments designed to prevent future policy change. Using conditional event history analysis on all states from 1999 to 2011 the empirical models analyze the spread of same‐sex marriage prohibitive amendments across the United States. Findings suggest that the nearby adoption of opposing policies encourage state legislatures to introduce prohibitive amendments. The regional diffusion effect suggests that policymakers “protect” their jurisdiction from nearby diffusion forces or seek electoral gains by symbolic protection by committing an already existing policy into the rigid state constitutional framework. Regional policy diffusion may, therefore, be explained by a countermovement mechanism unique to the state constitutional amendment process. This protective strategy among state legislatures and citizens may explain why many policy areas are frequently codified in state constitutions.

Race and Education in North Carolina: From Segregation to Desegregation by John E. Batchelor

Reviewed by: Race and Education in North Carolina: From Segregation to Desegregationby John E. Batchelor Paula C. Austin Race and Education in North Carolina: From Segregation to Desegregation. By John E. Batchelor. Making the Modern South. ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2015. Pp. xviii, 222. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6136-4.) In Race and Education in North Carolina: From Segregation to Desegregation, John E. Batchelor explores North Carolina's claim that by the 1970s, "99.5 percent of the state's black students were attending desegregated [End Page 477]schools" (p. 138). The book contends that the state achieved this level of school integration, despite its long segregationist history, while maintaining its image as moderate on race. Batchelor argues that although the state's wary political responses to the Brown v. Board of Education(1954) decision had little systemic impact on desegregation, federal court orders accelerated token black student reassignments and positioned North Carolina to achieve "more thorough school desegregation" than anywhere else in the South (p. 143). Using case law, oral histories, and archival sources, Batchelor compares state policies after Brownwith judicial mandates, finding the latter had weightier consequences. The book's first half deals with the recommendations of the governor's advisory committee, which was responsible for compliance with Brownat the local level. This committee made it difficult for a single lawsuit to force desegregation of all North Carolina schools and resulted in only a trickle of black students into white schools. The second half of the book, while continuing to examine the failures of Pearsall committee policies like the Pupil Assignment Act (1955), details federal court judgments. Judges, "in obedience to the law," yielded to the Civil Rights Act (1964) and determined local desegregation plans unconstitutional (p. 85). Earlier cases like Morrow v. Mecklenburg County Board of Education(1961) and Wheeler v. Durham City Board of Education(1961) pushed local boards to integrate even as they proposed and implemented racist freedom-of-choice plans. The Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education(1971) decision on busing motivated both the establishment of a state-funded Technical Assistance Center for desegregation and support from white business and civic leaders. In the end, North Carolina achieved through the judiciary what it could not do politically. Batchelor details the political machinations used to resist integration, including state constitutional amendments that eliminated compulsory attendance for any white child assigned to a school with black students. These received widespread public support and were later challenged by federal judges. However, in its efforts to demonstrate a peaceful movement toward "systemwide desegregation," particularly in the South, the book minimizes the impact of delegating compliance with Brownto the local level, a move that significantly stymied the NAACP legal strategy (p. 124). Additionally, in some places the book downplays the violence that happened in the state: both the rhetorical violence revealed in judges' opinions and political officials' statements that treated black inferiority as a foregone conclusion, and the physical and psychological violence experienced by students, including eggs thrown and crosses burned. Perhaps a deeper engagement with civil rights historiography, beyond William H. Chafe's Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Freedom Struggle(New York, 1980) could have helped Batchelor better situate his argument in a national context and consider the quotidian manifestations of Jim Crow violence. Still, Race and Education in North Carolinadoes not profess to be a social history. It traces and then foregrounds the impact of legal decisions in the wake of Brownin North Carolina's struggle against its own moderate obstructionism. Batchelor's device for framing each chapter with a concise introduction and critical questions to be answered by the chapter will be helpful to undergraduate readers. Pairing this book with other recent titles that examine the movement for [End Page 478]educational equity, like Sarah Caroline Thuesen's Greater Than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965(Chapel Hill, 2013), will provide students with both a lesson in historiography and a variegated look at the struggle for racial justice in North Carolina. Paula C. Austin California State University, Sacramento Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association...

Should the Indebted Support a State Constitutional Amendment to Restrict Public Authority Borrowing?

Since the early 1900s, in the absence of voter approval or often knowledge, the state’s public authorities have given rise to more than 95 percent of the state’s aggregate debt and assumed responsibility for 85 percent of our infrastructure. They serve, many have suggested, as a shadow government. Good government organizations have increasingly urged adoption of a state constitutional amendment to place limits on the ability of the public authorities to borrow in the absence of voter approval. Others respond that fiscal limitations on entities responsible for sustaining the state’s solvency would be ill conceived and could catastrophically impair the state’s access to the capital markets. This chapter examines the issue.

The march toward marriage equality: Reexamining the diffusion of same-sex marriage among states

The issue of same-sex marriage and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality has received considerable attention from policy scholars. This is unsurprising given the issue is one of the defining social policy battles of the last decade. State governments at the forefront of this battle have responded by proposing a multitude of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender-related policies. In this study, we comparatively assess the diffusion of two of these policies across US states: the legal recognition of same-sex marriages and state constitutional amendments defining marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman. While previous studies have examined the diffusion of same-sex marriage bans across states, none have offered a comparative examination of how both sides of this contentious issue have advanced their policy preferences alongside each other. Using event history analysis, we analyze a unique set of covariates to test two diffusion hypotheses: learning and imitation. We find that for both policies, policy learning is the primary mechanism occurring, suggesting that policymakers learn from one another for the same policy area, even if the policies have different motives or objectives. However, the effect of learning is more prominent for anti-gay policies, suggesting there are differences between policies.

Parents, Homevoters, and Public School Employees: An Analysis of Voting Patterns in the 2012 Georgia Charter Schools Amendment Referendum

ABSTRACTGeorgia’s 2012 Charter Schools Amendment was the first successful statewide school choice referendum in the United States. This amendment permitted the state to authorize new charter schools, thereby creating a way for charter creators to bypass local school boards. This study analyzes voting on this state constitutional amendment and finds that support was higher among counties with lower achieving public schools, more school-aged children, more adults having college degrees, more private school enrollment, more homeowners, and lower public school employment. There was also a positive correlation between Democratic voters and support for the amendment–this result differs from previous research and the heavily Republican legislative vote authorizing the public referendum.

Editor's Introduction: The Politics of Urban Reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 1870–1920

Editor's Introduction: The Politics of Urban Reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 1870–1920

Deprivatizing Islamic law: an argument for judicial interpretation of shari'a in American courts

The expansion of private Islamic arbitration services in the United States has provoked opposition from an anti-shari'a movement that is actively seeking legislative reforms and state constitutional amendments to curb what it describes as a “stealth jihad” aimed at Islamizing the American legal system. This article challenges the anti-sharia movement’s narrative and proposes an alternative explanation for the rise of Islamic arbitration as an inevitable by-product of the overall trend toward privatization of law – a process in which courts are outsourcing traditional state functions of dispute resolution to extra-judicial forums that lack the procedural and constitutional safeguards available in ordinary courts. Arguing against proposals for bans on judicial enforcement of shari'a, I argue that courts should take opportunities to deprivatize Islamic law by interpreting and regulating it. Contrary to claims that secular courts are neither competent nor constitutionally authorized to interpret religious law, recent case law indicates that American courts have already been interpreting shari'a for years, and have done so in ways that are fully consistent with federal and state laws.

Conservatism and the Underidentification of Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders in Special Education

Underidentification of students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD; emotional disturbance or ED in federal language) is a critical issue, perhaps explainable in part by causal attributions of problem behavior associated with conservatism. Conservatism in 58 counties in the state of California was measured by finding the percentage of voters in the county voting in favor or Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, under the assumption that opposition to gay marriage is an indicator of conservatism. We conducted a series of hierarchical regression analyses in which conservatism, ethnicity, free/reduced lunch, and suspension/expulsion were used to explain county rates of ED, intellectual disability, and learning disability identification. The model for county identification of ED accounted for 45% of the variance from county to county, with conservatism being the strongest predictor (β = −0.78, p < 0.001). More conservative counties had lower rates of ED identification. Other variables may contribute to under-identification, but causal attributions associated with conservatism may play a significant role.

The History of the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, 1600–2012 by David Miller et al. (review)

Reviewed by: The History of the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, 1600–2012 by David Miller et al. Sweeney Windchief The History of the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, 1600–2012. By David Miller, Dennis Smith, Joseph McGeshik, James Shanley, and Caleb Shields. Poplar mt: Fort Peck Community College, 2012. xiii + 592 pp. Photographs, maps, notes, index. $80.00 paper. A Montana state constitutional amendment in 1972, coupled with American Indian connection to education and representation in the state legislature, led to the Montana Indian Education for All Act. This law gave Montana tribes support in writing their own histories. The collective work of Miller, Smith, McGeshik, Shanley, and Shields provides a historical foundation for the Great Plains’ original peoples as they establish their own histories in the curriculums of their public school systems. The authors, in addition to prolific historical accounts, use a bifurcated system of delivery that examines the tribes separately. This maintains that all tribes represented on the reservation have their specific and distinctive histories, cultures, and ontologies. The work includes an examination of the complexity and continuous development of intertribal relationships. The book is comprehensive in its approach in addressing the way in which the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes have experienced multiple administrations and continue to operate in relation to federal Indian policy. Critique can only be related to missing stories in the history presented. The content and therefore the responsibility of these stories belongs to the respective families, and may or may not be shared depending upon one’s context and perspective. The duplication of photographs (p. 252 replicated on p. 281, and p. 434 repeated on p. 522) and misspellings (p. vi) reveal proofreading oversight. The majority of the book’s content is comprised of information extracted from historical documentation around tribal leadership, history, and development in a context specific to the particular tribes. This is an integral part of the broader story of the Great Plains and highlights the people, policies, and practices of the Northern Plains specifically in and around Montana. Scholars from the Fort Peck Indian community authored this book, providing an authenticity often missed when written by scholars from outside. From the delineation of homelands inhabited at the time of contact through the twenty-first-century context, the information in this book potentially prompts further academic work (i.e., tribal leadership, the North American bison, American Indian education including the tribal college movement, and economic development). In conclusion, this work [End Page 288] provides information essential to the future of the indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. Sweeney Windchief Adult and Higher Education Montana State University Copyright © 2014 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Courthouse democracy and minority rights: same-sex marriage in the states

Preface Part One: Introduction Chapter 1: Promises, Promises Chapter 2: Understanding the Impact of State Supreme Courts Part Two: The Legal Context Chapter 3: Early Same-Sex Marriage Decisions Chapter 4: Massachusetts and Beyond Part Three: An Analysis of State Judicial Impact Chapter 5: Policy Initiation: The Diffusion of Same-Sex Marriage Cases Across the States Chapter 6: Policy Legitimation: Evaluating the Capacity of State Courts to Change Public Opinion Chapter 7: Policy Endurance: The Enactment of State Constitutional Amendments Prohibiting Same-Sex Marriage Chapter 8: The Promise of State Courts Works Cited