Professors Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips received the 2011 Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper presented at the 2010 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference.
The MPSA is one of the largest political science conferences in the discipline, typically attracting more than 5,000 presenters from the United States and 55 other countries presenting more than 3,900 papers.
Lax and Phillips's award, sponsored by the National Political Science Honor Society, recognizes "The Democratic Deficit in State Policymaking," which studies how well states translate public opinion into policy.
Using national surveys and advances in
sub-national opinion estimation, Lax and Phillips estimate state-level support for 39
policies across 8 issue areas, including abortion, law enforcement, health
care, and education. They show that policy is highly responsive to policy-specific
opinion, even controlling for ideological and partisan influences. They also
uncover a striking "democratic deficit": policy is congruent with
majority will only about half the time. Even supermajority support is often
insufficient. They assess the influence of institutions, partisan control of
government, and interest groups on the magnitude and ideological direction of
this democratic deficit and find that the magnitude of the deficit is most affected by legislative
professionalization, term limits, and issue salience. Their findings further indicate that partisanship and interest
groups affect the ideological balance of incongruence more than the aggregate
degree thereof, and, finally, that policy is over-responsive to ideology and party--causing policy to be polarized relative to state electorates.
The full paper can be accessed here.
