No correlation between state discretion and policy changes

Let us start with the null hypothesis that state policy activity and the content of the Congressional hearing agenda may well be unrelated to each other. Or rather, given the findings by Baumgartner, Gray, and Lowery (2009) that national attention to issues does influence policy activity in the states, the relevant null hypothesis is that the converse may not be true. Certainly, despite ever more rapid diffusion of policy innovations, not all states focus on the same issues at the same time (Gray et al. 2005). Thus, it is not obvious that the states as whole might influence the national policy agenda in a systematic manner. And even if state agendas moved together in lockstep, much of what attracts the attention of state legislators may well not be what concerns their national counterparts. This would be especially true for a number of issues that are mainly influenced by national policy or on the other hand mainly by state policy. State attention to corrections policy, for example, may be partly related to federal concerns, but the states are the primary force behind corrections policy whereas the federal role is very limited. The reverse is true with regard to other policies of broader national concern, such as nuclear proliferation. Thus, different policy areas of concern to the states feature more or less involvement of the federal government. This might well suggest that, at best, we should expect a more limited impact of state policy activities on the distribution of federal attention to issues in those areas where the states play relatively little role. And last, given Baumgartner and Jones’ (1993) punctuated equilibrium model, legislative agendas are quite sticky, changing only periodically and with some difficulty. If so, then it is not clear that the national policy agenda would respond in anything close to a contemporaneous manner to activity at the state level. For example, the collapse of President Clinton’s national health care proposal in 1994 arguably did lead to greater state attention to health care, but this developed rather slowly over several years as the realization that the national government was, at least for a time, out of the health care game (Gray, Lowery, and Godwin 2007a; 2007b). In sum, there are plenty of good reasons to not expect to find a strong relationship between levels of state policy attention and such attention at the national level.