Ideological Representation in the Governor's Mansion: Constituency influence on governors' policy agendas.

In state policy making, governors are the only political actors that represent an entire state rather than a legislative subdivision. Governors, with their power of initiation, hold a significant advantage over the state legislatures in setting the policy agenda (Jewell and Morehouse 2001). Despite this key role governors play in shaping policy, the study of what factors influence governors' policy agendas has received little attention in the scholarly literature. What research that has been done on state policy agendas focuses only on governors in several states (Morehouse 1998; Van Assendelft 1997) or on other inputs to the policy making process. In this latter regard, state policy has been found to be reflective of both electoral (legislatures) (Erikson, Wright, and McIver 1993) and party activist coalitions (Morehouse 1998). The representational bond, as analyzed by Erikson, Wright and McIver (1993), appears strongest between aggregated opinion of the mass electorate and elected officials. Owing to "measurement considerations, rather than a disregard for the governor's role in the legislative process," the role of the governor is not included in these models of policy representation (Erikson, Wright and McIver 1993, 126). Morehouse (1998), however, suggests that the policy process frequently begins with the governor. We propose to examine the factors that affect the ideological directions of governors' agendas by first developing a reliable way to systematically measure those dispositions. We then consider the state level indicators that shape the political bent of governors' agendas.Since a governor's "state of the state" address outlines the main political priorities he or she wants enacted, they provide the best insight into the governor's political agenda (Coffey 2005). We conduct a content analysis of state of the state speeches from 1991 through 1993 and 2000 through 2002 to measure the ideology of governors' legislative agendas. We then use data from the mass electorate, party activists, state legislatures, and state-level contextual data to test hypotheses about how governors' policy agendas respond ideologically to both elite and mass constituents, political actors in the legislature, and the nature of their states. To develop measures of governor ideology, we rely on content analytic techniques developed by Laver and Benoit (2003) and Laver, Benoit, and Garry (2003). We employ the 1992 and 2000 Convention Delegate Studies to measure elite attitudes ideology as well as data from 1992 and 2000 exit polls to measure the ideology of mass partisans. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]