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david_sharick's review
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Accountability in State Legislatures is a political science book about, as the name implies, how state legislatures respond (or don't respond) to electoral pressures, and what factors affect this responsiveness. It covers a lot of topics around this theme: whether state legislators even run for reelection, whether they get challenged, how much voters even know about their state legislator, how much factors unrelated to the legislator's performance impact their election chances, and so on, drawing on lots of data about state legislative elections going back decades.
To spoil the ending (even though it's on the back of the book), this book paints a pretty dire picture of the democratic process in state legislatures, from a lot of different angles. It has a few policy recommendations, though that's not really the focus as compared to defining the problem. It has a lot of interesting takeaways and statistics about state legislatures, but it's also pretty dry, although there's a bit of humor sprinkled in at parts.
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