Leveraging state policy data and administrative data on charter schools, I first demonstrate the importance of favorable charter laws for promoting the growth of new charter schools. Though the great majority of the states permit charter schools, charter laws vary markedly in aspects like funding, caps on new schools, and authorization procedures. In 2017, charter schools enrolled over 10 percent of total K-12 public school students in states like Colorado and Louisiana, but less than 1 percent in Washington state and Mississippi. The emergence and growth of charter schools in states with favorable charter laws came at an opportune moment for foundations aiming to expand their education portfolios. Several newer foundations with living donors, dissatisfied with the state of education philanthropy, sought to provide more support to “jurisdictional challengers” —organizations that they hoped would provide fresh ideas and energy by competing with elements of the traditional K-12 education system. Charter schools presented these foundations with an opportunity to do so. Thus, in the early 2000’s, foundations provided a critical source of funds directly seeding new charter schools and developing operational infrastructure for establishing new schools. As charter schools grew and began to present a meaningful challenge to incumbent education interests, the politics became more contested. Charter school boosters increasingly recognized the importance of maintaining and expanding pro-charter policy to sustain growth. Drawing on tax data, I document a shift in the mid-2000’s,hydroponic shelves with foundations greatly increasing their charter advocacy grant-making over time. They expanded from primarily funding charter school operations to also providing grants to pro-charter education reform advocacy groups— thus engaging politically to defend prior investments made in the charter school movement.
In each of the policy areas I study, reforms achieved at the state-level did not just produce learning and competitive pressures for other states—they also fundamentally restructured the broader interest group politics. State-level reforms created and empowered coalitions of organized interests that deployed newfound strength to expand and diffuse preferred policies across multiple states and up to the federal level. In terms of theoretical contribution, these papers thus demonstrate the gains to examining mechanisms of policy interdependence outside of learning and competition. In particular, they suggest that policies that affect the resources of organized interests are likely to have political and policy implications across the federal system. The dissertation also compels scholars of federalism interested in exploring policy interdependencies to study other outcomes outside of the simple spread of policies across jurisdictions. When state policy reforms shift the resources or engagement of organized interests, the effects can go beyond the diffusion of those particular policy reforms. Take the marijuana case. Elements of the marijuana industry newly empowered by state legalization have not only lobbied for the diffusion of legalization to the federal level—they have also lobbied on issues of federal enforcement, banking regulations, tax policy, and others. Similarly, the pro-charter interest group coalition that formed following the passage of charter laws across a range of states in the 90’s advocated for different policies from the federal government than the states. State policies can, in addition to potentially driving a policy diffusion process, shift the broader organized group landscape in a particular policy area —thus opening avenues for additional reforms that were previously unavailable due to unfavorable interest group politics. What this means for reformers seeking to change policy over the long term is that attention to multiple sites and levels of government is essential. There is growing interest in considering how policies might be sequenced over time, leveraging positive feed backs to deconstruct blockages and ratchet up reforms .
These ideas are particularly compelling for considering the politics of decarbonization . This dissertation shows that space, in addition to time, is a relevant factor in considering how to ratchet up policy reforms. Reforms achieved at the state level can play a critical role in building an interest group coalition capable of not only expanding those state-level policies, but also propagating those and aligned policies to new locales.Once considered a backwater, state politics has become a critical arena of American politics. In the face of congressional gridlock, national-level political actors have turned to the states as venues for achieving their policy goals . Policy variation across the states is growing and is increasingly associated with whether Democrats or Republicans control state office . Perhaps as a result, candidates for state office have amassed huge sums of campaign contributions from outside of their states in recent years . Renewed interest in state politics is in part driven by an understanding that state-level decisions have implications for politics and policy across the country. This understanding is reflected in a rich tradition of scholarship in American federalism examining the ways that policies adopted in one federal unit can affect politics and policy making elsewhere . At the core of this literature is the concept of states as “laboratories of democracy” —the idea that state lawmakers learn from policy experiments carried out elsewhere. Building on this concept, existing literature studying the diffusion of policies across the federal system has focused on mechanisms of learning and competition . This paper2 argues that traditional policy diffusion mechanisms do not account for an important source of policy interdependence—namely, the effects of sub-national policies on the capacities of interest groups to influence policy in the broader federal system. My theoretical argument builds on the classic finding in the policy feedback literature that policies shape the landscape of organized interests represented in the political system . I identify and explore mechanisms by which these dynamics can manifest across units and levels of government—bringing a focus to the intergovernmental effects of policy on interest group politics.
Broadly speaking, sub-national reforms that benefit particular organized interests also tend to strengthen them politically. These interests, in turn, might have an economic incentive to apply newfound strength to seek to propagate the reforms that benefit them. In this way, mechanisms of policy feedback can—like learning and competition—drive policy diffusion . Empirically, I examine cross-state policy feedback—the effects of state policy on the politics in other states—in distributed, or rooftop, solar policy.Unlike traditional utility-owned centralized power sources, rooftop solar arrays are connected to distribution systems and are generally owned or leased by customers. State-level policy played a key role in promoting the strong growth of rooftop solar over the last decade. I show that, by empowering new business interests that subsequently engaged politically across federal system,vertical growing racks state solar policies affected the politics in other states. The clear role of state policy in the growth of a new industry makes rooftop solar an instructive case for examining cross-state feedback effects. But this is also a hard case to observe effects due to the power and opposition of incumbent electric utilities.The empirical analysis proceeds in three general steps. First, I bring together data measuring state rooftop solar policies with administrative data on solar installations to investigate the relationship between policy and solar growth. Results from two-way fixed effects regression models indicate faster rooftop solar growth in states with pro-rooftop solar policies. Though findings are consistent with advocates’ and industries’ understanding , this finding—by providing empirical evidence for the substantive importance of state policy—lays the groundwork for the subsequent analyses. In the second step, I bring together firm-level lobbying disclosure data with firm-level system installation data to examine the feedback effects of state rooftop solar policies both in the states where they are adopted and in other states. I specifically examine the political engagement of large installer firms that have been central to efforts to expand and defend pro-distributed solar policies. Results from multilevel modeling indicate that a rooftop solar installer’s lobbying in a particular state depends on its economic presence in that state—but also its economic presence across the states. In addition, by tracking the economic expansion and political activity of the two largest rooftop solar installers, I find evidence of firms seeking to influence policy in markets where they did not yet have an economic presence in preparation for potential expansion. These findings, combined with the results indicating the importance of state policy to industry growth, suggest that state policy decisions affected political contestation in other states. Installers relied on growth in early adopters of favorable rooftop solar policies to accumulate resources, and then deployed those resources to propagate favorable policies more broadly. Third, I present analysis suggesting these cross-state feedback effects had policy consequences. Two-way fixed effects models indicate that installer lobbying is associated with more favorable state policies, with larger effects in states with lower levels of distributed solar penetration.
Qualitative analysis of the case of South Carolina affirms the plausibility of installers influencing policy even in states where they did not have an economic presence. By partnering with local groups and hiring well-connected lobbyists, Sunrun was able to drive policy shifts that led to the construction of a new market it could then expand into. This paper contributes to a growing body of literature at the intersection of federalism, policy feedback, and interest groups . Recent advances have documented how federated unions rely heavily on resources from affiliates in states with favorable labor laws , and how renewable energy interests leveraged states with favorable policies as “beach-heads” for their expansion across the country . Empirically, I build on this developing literature by using a rich array of evidence to trace out a causal chain from state policy to shifts in interest group engagement to policy decisions in other states. Conceptually, while existing work in this area, especially that on labor unions, has focused on organizational maintenance, I bring a focus to the role of state policy in driving lobbying and policy expansion—thereby bridging this literature with scholarship on policy diffusion and policy interdependence. By integrating policy feedback and policy diffusion concepts, this paper provides a framework for understanding and examining a myriad of inter dependencies in our federal system that are difficult to study with existing theoretical frameworks. Sub-national policies do not just motivate learning and competition: they also fundamentally affect the resources of organized interests that, in many cases, engage politically across the federal system. This can serve as a mechanism of policy diffusion, as groups that benefit from, and are strengthened by, particular sub-national reforms deploy their newfound strength to propagate the reforms that benefit them. However, the cross-unit political engagement of organized interests empowered by sub-national reforms will, in most cases, go beyond simply seeking to propagate those reforms. As a result, the perspective put forward here suggests that, in addition to potentially initiating a process of diffusion, sub-national reforms can also more durably shape interest group competition in the broader federal system over long time horizons. In addition to theoretical contributions, this paper also has practical implications for climate advocates. Well-designed climate policies not only drive shifts from fossil fuel energy infrastructure to renewables infrastructure, but also replace fossil fuel political interests with clean energy interests . As I show, this positive feedback can manifest across state lines, lending weight to an institutionally and geographically pluralistic advocacy approach to climate politics. Prominent theoretical perspectives for studying policy interdependence in American federalism have focused on three key mechanisms: political learning, competition, and firm preferences for unified standards. The general concept of political learning goes at least as far back as Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis’s famous characterization of the states as “laboratories of democracy” . The basic logic of political learning is straightforward. Re-election motivated government officials generally prefer policies that benefit their constituents. If officials observe that a policy is performing well in another federal unit, this indicates that the policy has a greater likelihood of succeeding in their own locale, so they are more likely to adopt it. As a result, well-performing policies, the theory suggests, will diffuse across units and levels of government . Of course, in practice, it is not so simple. As Gilardi points out, officials are concerned broadly with the political effects of adopting a particular policy, not just whether that policy worked well elsewhere. In Gilardi’s analysis, whether learning leads to policy diffusion depends on officials’ prior beliefs and ideologies, and experimental work supports the notion that ideology moderates political learning .4 Broadly speaking, this finding suggests that political polarization can weaken learning as a diffusion mechanism.