State Politics and Policy Conference 2010

I’ve returned from the 10th annual State Politics and Policy Conference, the yearly conference of APSA’s “State Politics” subsection. This year’s conference was located a mere 1.5 hours away at the Springfield campus of the University of Illinois. My attendance this year was a crime of opportunity. In addition to the convenient locale, the conference had no attendance fee, and I was able to save on accommodations by camping at Sangchris State Park. I nearly had the camp ground to myself, which is a nice feature after a busy conference.

I spent most of the conference shopping for data sources for a few projects that are looking to exploit variation in state-level institutions. I’d rate my results as “B+”. I did not find a one-stop-shop of state level data, but I did find several useful discrete data sources (for example, common space ideal points for state legislators).

Marc Meredith contributed my favorite paper of the conference: Exploiting Friends and Neighbors: An Instrumental Variable Approach to Estimating Coattail Effects. Meredith used home counties of governors as an instrumental variable for measuring coattail effects to down ballot races. The logic is fairly straightforward. We would expect candidates for governor tend to do better in their home county, but down ballot candidates of the same party should get no gain from where the governor lives, expect for coattail effects. Its a clever design, and Meredith finds that coattails effects have traditionally been over-estimated. I’m looking forward to seeing this paper in published form, when Meredith is able to smooth out the remaining wrinkles (of which he is largely aware - his conclusion slide was almost an exact duplicate of my notes and questions during the talk).

As a final note, the conference organizers did a fantastic job with this conference. Next year’s conference in Dartmouth will have large shoes to fill. See you next year in Hanover, NH.