Federalism and the Pennsylvania Legislature

Partisanship and Intergovernmental Priorities

Abstract

State governments use many tools to convey their policy preferences to the federal government. Most studies of these tools focus on intergovernmental lobbying groups of individual state representatives in Washington, D.C. Through instructive, these studies fail to compare political parties' intergovernmental issue priorities. Our article fills this void by means of a longitudinal analysis of legislative resolutions submitted to the federal government between 1979 and 2011 by state legislateors in Pennsylvania. This dataset reveals varying levels of support for federal policy among Pennsylvania's legislaters, depending on their partisan affiliation.