Replication Data for \"Partisan Misalignment and the Counter-Partisan Response: How National Politics Conditions Majority-Party Policymaking in the American States\"

When one political party gains control of American national governing institutions, they increase the prospects of enacting their party’s policy agenda. Faced with this partisan misalignment, we expect that state governments controlled by the national outparty to respond to the national partisan context with more state policy activism. Examining changes in state policy liberalism from 1974 to 2019, we find that both Republican- and Democratic-controlled states have pushed policy further in their preferred ideological directions when the opposing party has greater partisan control over the national policy agenda in Washington. We also find differences between the two parties. While the effect of Republican control gets modestly stronger as Democrats gain power at the national level, Democratic-controlled states have shown dramatically larger shifts in policy liberalism during periods of Republican national control. This arrangement, however, appears to be a contemporary one, emerging in the more polarized political environment since the mid-1990s.