Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The main purpose of this work is to test empirically the power of state chief executives to shape state policy processes. American governors’ role in state policy process has been analyzed in a number of empirical studies. In many instances, however, policy priorities are inferred from party affiliations and operationalized as a simple dichotomy, where Democratic politicians predominantly favor higher levels of spending and Republican governors prefer a smaller government. This work relies on a direct and more nuanced measure of gubernatorial policy priorities, which are extracted from the State of the State addresses delivered at the outset of the legislative session in front of the lawmakers and containing major gubernatorial policy goals for the upcoming year. This study applies Latent Dirichlet allocation statistical algorithms for discovering thematic structure of the addresses and estimating relative importance of a policy topic to the governor. This increasingly popular approach to text analysis offers a consistent and objective way to systematically analyze large collections of documents. A total of 499 gubernatorial addresses delivered from 2007 to 2017 is included in the study. Preliminary text analysis indicates that governors select and frame several major policy items (4-5) in their State of the State addresses

Using the data reported in biannual Fiscal Surveys of the States, this longitudinal study tests the empirical effect of gubernatorial policy priorities on fiscal policy changes requested by the governor. Additional models analyze the relationship between gubernatorial policy priorities and fiscal policy changes adopted by the lawmakers. Governors’ ability to pursue their policy goals is conditional on political and institutional conditions, such chief executive political capital, experience and varying formal powers as well as institutional and ideological structure of the legislature. Based on the extant literature, it is hypothesized that controlling for these important factors, gubernatorial policy goals have a significant impact on state policy process and outcomes.