ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on state elections. It explains some aspects of the change factors that not only help to explain change at the state level but, also help to explain stability at the national level–specifically, stability in the partisan composition of the House of Representatives. The chapter suggests that some of the factors underlying electoral change in the states are "nonpolitical" in the usual partisan or ideological sense. The sources of decline in unified state can be located even more precisely in a second, institutional sense. In seeking to explain electoral developments in the states that are roughly analogous to those at the national level, one naturally turns to explanations that have been offered for national developments. But one structural change in state legislatures, increasing professionalism, appears to have not only an indirect link to partisan change in the states but also a indirect link to partisan stability in the United States House.
