Enik Rising

A few years ago, Michael Gormley wrote a piece for USA Today mainly focusing on the Eliot Spitzer scandal but also mentioning that inappro...

I was sitting in on a caucus meeting of Colorado Senate Democrats the other day during the last day of the state's special legislative s...

Legislators and reporters gather around Speaker McNulty late last night to ask about bringing the chamber out of recess. If you weren...

Last year, Dan Butler and David Broockman published an article  showing that African American constituents who wrote to state legislators we...

I'm teaching a bit about medical marijuana in my state & local politics class this week. It turns out it's a really useful issue...

Imagine, for a moment, that you didn't need to raise money to run for office, that the government would pay you to run. Who would that h...

Nate Silver has a nice post up in which he compares the ideological stances of current governors with those of the voters they represent. I...

Susan Schulten has a great post up about the birth of West Virginia (a.k.a. Kanawha) during the Civil War. But one thing I remain a bit fuz...

Betsy Russell chronicles some interesting goings-on in state legislatures of late in a recent article in the Spokesman-Review: Montana law...

Source

From the Denver Post : A GOP state senator admitted Wednesday that the redistricting maps Republicans drew were deliberately tweaked to giv...

An amazing story out of the Colorado statehouse illustrating the dangers of narrow majorities: State Rep. Larry Liston, a Republican from C...

I'm currently reading what may be the most erotic depiction of legislative procedure ever committed to ink: I'll have what they...

Hmm, this photo seems to be making the rounds on blogs and e-mail threads: Here's the accompanying text: House Minority Leader Lawre...

Dan Smith points me to this recent item in Stateline : Nebraska is the only state with a unicameral Legislature, and lawmakers there are d...

I'm kind of kicking myself that I haven't been devoting my sabbatical time to researching partisanship in the Wisconsin statehouse. ...

Here's a lovely letter from Wisconsin's Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald to Democratic Senator Mark Miller, the minority lea...

Are elected officials good representatives of their districts? That's actually a difficult question for political scientists to answer, ...

James Battista has a piece (gated) in the most recent State Politics and Policy Quarterly examining formal and perceptual power among leade...

Just to expand on my previous post , a few years ago I wrote an article investigating the influence of legislative seating arrangements on ...