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Abstract
This paper explores the speed of rulemaking in American state governments. Drawing on a unique data set of over 250,000 individual rules issued by states from 1993 through 2009, we introduce new measures of the speed and breadth of rulemaking in American state bureaucracies, providing a new way of evaluating the incidence of rulemaking delay within and across governments. We focus specifically on how professionalism and oversight powers of state legislative and executive branches affect rulemaking speed and find that states with more professionalized legislatures and governments with extensive legislative/executive oversight powers experience greater delays in rule adoption. These findings provide important new insights into the politics of regulatory delay and suggest disparate ways in which sub-national governments approach regulatory policymaking in a federal system.

Abstract
Scholars of American politics debate the consequences of polarized and divided government on lawmaking but have largely neglected the impact of institutional conflict on the policy outputs of the bureaucracy. We argue that lawmaking gridlock creates opportunities and demands for governors and civil servants to pursue policy goals through rulemaking. To explore these dynamics, we draw upon a comprehensive dataset of over 150,000 proposed and adopted rules issued by US state agencies from 1994 through 2009 and compare differences in rulemaking output within states across periods of divided and unified party control. We find that policy conflict (measured by the presence of a party divided legislature) leads to a 3%–7% increase in the number of proposed and adopted rules. We then explore how variation in state powers of legislative oversight affect rulemaking, and find that these effects are concentrated in governments with weaker powers of legislative review. Our research speaks to debates in the literature regarding the nature of bureaucratic policymaking and highlights practical consequences of legislative gridlock and partisan polarization.