Passed but Not Maintained: Partisan Control and Policy Drift in State Pay Equity Law

Abstract

Despite decades of state-level pay equity legislation, the gender wage gap persists across the United States, raising the question of what explains this policy failure. This thesis examines one potential answer: the role of partisan conditions in determining whether pay equity laws are maintained and enforced over time. I develop a twelve-point maintenance index to assess post-passage durability of pay equity policies and use it to assess the partisan governance correlates of six states’ trajectories. I find that Democratic legislative composition is a strong predictor of post-passage durability, while gubernatorial party affiliation is not. Comparative case analysis across six states spanning the full range of partisan environments reveals that drift takes different forms depending on political conditions. Stable Democratic majorities produce iterative institutional investment, while competitive environments or other factors can constrain that investment even when Democratic majorities persist. These findings suggest that passing a pay equity law is a necessary but insufficient condition for closing the gender wage gap: what happens after passage is just as important as the law itself.