Revisiting the State of U. S. State Legislative Research

Abstract

Fifteen years ago, in this journal, Malcolm Jewell surveyed the field of state legislative research. In so doing, he identified some topics about which we, as a scholarly community, did not have adequate information. He also suggested some lines of inquiry for further research. In effect, in that 1981 article, Malcolm Jewell helped define the research agenda for a generation of state legislative scholars by discussing the state of our knowledge in seven specific areas. In this article we update the state of our knowledge in those seven areas by surveying more than 160 studies published in the years subsequent to Jewell's "The State of U.S. State Legislative Research."