Professor of Political Science, and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Dan Butler, has published a new article in the journal, Political Research Quarterly, co-written with former WashU PoliSci PhD, and current Assistant Professor at University of California-San Diego, Benjamin Noble. The article, titled, "Are Voters' Preferences Being Ignored in Governor's Agendas?", uses State of the State addresses over several decades to explore the divide between gubernatorial popularity and misaligned policy.
"Policy regimes are increasingly partisan, but rather than representing “a sea change in public opinion,” these outcomes are driven by “increasingly coordinated national networks of activists and organizations” that are not representative of state-level constituency preferences. Given this incongruence between voter preferences and policy regimes, we might expect governors—the best-known representative in a state—to be unpopular. But that is not the case."
Read the abstract below and the full article on the Political Research Quarterly website.
Abstract:
States are partisan laboratories of democracy where policy is misaligned with constituency preferences. Yet governors are popular. To resolve this puzzle, we argue governors use aligned rhetoric to make up for out-of-step policymaking, and this alignment has improved as nationalization, polarization, and policy extremity have increased. To test our argument, we measure the partisan slant of gubernatorial rhetoric in 2,400 State of the State Addresses (1962–2023). We fine-tune BERT models to predict the partisanship of held-out speeches using other contemporaneous addresses as training data. When a governor “sounds like” her co-partisans, the model labels her speech as more partisan. This predicted probability provides a dynamic, time-varying measure of gubernatorial partisan slant. We show governors have polarized, but these changes increasingly correlate with constituency partisanship. We also find rhetorical alignment predicts gubernatorial approval as well, which may help explain why governors are so popular.
