The Neglected World of State Politics

The basic assumption of this paper is that research in state government and politics has received too low a priority and too few resources. In addition to its inherent importance, this field deserves attention because it is undergoing change and because it provides an arena for testing hypotheses developed in national studies. There is a need for more systematic and comprehensive collection and analysis of data, and also for more current information on developments. We lack adequate single-state studies, and more importantly, we lack genuinely comparative studies. We have given little thought to the theoretical foundations of comparative state studies. These needs suggest the importance not only of greater resource allocation but of imaginative efforts to develop organizational structures for long-term cooperative research.