Abstract This article traces the development of the state politics subfield within political science. Using three sources of evidence – the publication of state politics articles in the American Political Science Review , American Journal of Political Science , and Journal of Politics ; the corpus of articles in State Politics and the programs of the State Politics and Policy Conference (SPPC) – we examine how the field has developed over the past six decades. We argue that the founding of SPPQ and SPPC helped formalize the subfield. But, as these subfield outlets entered the scene, the proportion of state politics research in leading generalist outlets began to decline even as the number of articles remains relatively constant. Additionally, the substantive focus of the subfield has endured, anchored in topics such as elections, legislatures, and public opinion, even as areas like judicial politics and gender have gained prominence and studies of political parties have declined. Finally, we document the rise of coauthorship in state politics research, reflecting the collaborative nature of the subfield.
Berkman et al. (Mon,) studied this question.