Nationalization and Its Consequences for State Legislatures.

GOVERNMENT ownership; LEGISLATIVE committees; ABORTION laws; EDUCATION policy; REPUBLICANS

Objective: I theorize that as nationalization increases, state legislatures will take less legislative actions related to local topics and take more legislative actions on divisive, national issues. Method: To measure nationalization I use election data as well as data on mass partisanship in a state. To measure a state's legislative agenda, I use data on legislative actions collected from LexisNexis. For my statistical analysis, I use two‐way linear fixed effects regression. Results: I find that as nationalization increases, legislatures take less legislative actions pertaining to education, transportation, and localities. I also find that as nationalization increases, Republican‐controlled states increase the number of legislative actions related to abortion. Conclusion: Taken together, the article provides evidence that nationalization delocalizes the agenda and places on the agenda issues associated with the national partisan conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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