Gov 1006 Final Project
This final project replicates the findings of the paper Policy Preferences and Policy Change: Dynamic Responsiveness in the American States, 1936-2014 by Devin Caughey and Christopher Warshaw.
This paper discusses the predictors of state policy change and pinpoints what factors have the strongest impact on a state's liberalism. In particular, the authors focus on mass political consensus and state policy response to changes in this consensus. They have acquired measures of mass policy preferences through an accumulation of multiple poll responses over time and of state policy liberalism using some defined estimates. Responsiveness is then measured as a relationship between the liberalism of the masses and the liberalism of the policies at each given moment in time.
All original files, seperated as provided in the Replication Data can be found in the Original Code folder. The concatenated code, also further commented can be found in total_code.R.