State Policy Mood: The Importance of Over-time Dynamics

Abstract

Recently, we introduced and validated annual state-level estimates of the public's policy mood and party identification from 1956 to 2010 and self-identified political ideology from 1976 to 2010. In this issue, Berry, Ringquist, Fording, and Hanson (BRFH) compare our measure of policy mood with a measure they created, and they conclude that their measure is “the best available indicator of state policy mood for researchers doing pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis.” In this article, we show that BRFH's skepticism of our measure and confidence in their measure result from a failure to fully consider over-time dynamics. When we consider over-time variation, the Enns and Koch measure of policy mood continues to perform well. By contrast, some concerning patterns emerge with the BRFH measure. In addition to further validating the Enns and Koch measure, this article speaks to similarities in opinion change across states and offers initial evidence of an over-time relationship between state policy mood and state spending priorities.