Lawmaking in the U.S.: American Legislatures and the Politics of Abortion and Charter Schools, 1997- 2014

Understanding the correlates of policy change is important, but difficult. Many theories regarding the production and alteration of policy exist, but the ability to empirically characterize the scope and magnitude of policy change across time and different institutional contexts is limited. Using annual evaluations of policy outcomes from interest groups, measures of the revealed preferences of political elites, and infor-mation on the rules of procedure in each legislature, we examine lawmaking in state legislatures across nearly two decades on two salient issues – abortion and education. We find that both the level and change in policy are most prominently related to the median legislator and the governor and that the relationship between the chamber me-dian and policy is most pronounced in legislatures with more majoritarian procedures. Conducting a simulation study to relate the reduced form empirical specifications to the predictions of extant lawmaking models reveals that our results are most consistent with models emphasizing the lawmaking constraints imposed by multiple veto points