What’s on the Table? The Content of State Policy Agendas

Abstract

While national policy agendas have evolved away from materialist issues to focus more on post-materialist concerns, much less is known about state legislative agendas. In this article, we utilize new data to describe the content of state legislative agendas from 1995 to 1999. We then examine why some states allocate more agenda space to postmaterialist policies than others. We find that states with larger and wealthier economies and greater representation by Democrats in the legislature allocate relatively more agenda space to post-materialist policies. We also find that the relative size of the population of interest organizations registered to lobby on post-materialist policies does not have a significant effect on the relative content of policy agendas. Representation of post-materialist policies in state agendas, while generally less dominant than in national agendas, originates, then, predominantly from the state’s economy and the political choices of its citizens.

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