Programmatic Supply and the Autonomy of US State Parties in 2008 and 2010

This paper examines the extent to which US state parties are autonomous from national party influence, evaluates how much state party autonomy varies across the USA, and examines possible explanations for this variance. We use newly collected party platform data from US state parties between 2008 and 2010 to examine the policy autonomy of state vis-à-vis national parties. In general, we find that US state parties have more extreme policy positions than the national parties. We also find significant variance in the levels of autonomy across state parties and that Democratic state parties are more autonomous than Republican ones.