Free, citable data for your research paper.

Take the ten category scores for all 50 states and measure the spread within each category. Categories with a wide range are where federalism does real work; narrow ranges are where federal law or national norms have already flattened the difference.

Open your state profile for the category breakdown, then run a head-to-head against each bordering state. The gaps that survive are your thesis.

Look your officials up by ZIP, then read the voting record and donor list on each profile. This is the standard "profile your representative" assignment, with primary-source records attached.

Start from the explainer for the legal definition and the adoption timeline, then use the 2nd Amendment ranking to see where each state lands.

The territories are tracked on the same ten categories but deliberately left out of the 1–50 ranking. Explaining why is itself a good short paper on citizenship and representation.

Code each state by trifecta control from a source you cite yourself, then test it against the overall score and against each category separately. The interesting finding is usually that the sign flips between economic and personal-freedom categories.

Compare an official’s roll-call record against the score of the state or district they represent. Divergence is the story: it is where personal ideology, party discipline, or donor pressure is doing the work.

Multi-year score trends show the movement; the category breakdown localizes it; the explainers and bill records tell you which statute moved it. A single state’s trajectory is a well-sized term paper.

The Accountability Index scores each official on disclosure completeness and related components, each published with its weight and underlying counts so you can recompute or dispute it.

Pair the ranking with Census net-migration figures you pull yourself, then test the correlation. The honest answer involves cost of living and jobs, which is what makes it a real paper rather than a talking point.

Nine states levy no broad income tax. Compare their sales-tax and property-tax positions against the national picture before concluding anything about total burden.

The regulatory category is built on restriction counts in each state’s administrative code. Interrogating whether counting the word "shall" is a valid proxy is a strong methods section.

Start from which states have the law and when they adopted it, then bring your own BLS wage series. Adoption dates matter more than the cross-section here.

A handful of states ban non-competes outright and several more cap them by salary. The staggered adoption dates make this one of the cleaner natural experiments available to an undergraduate.

Run a real income through the calculator across states, then check the result against the property- and sales-tax pages. It is a good lesson in why headline rates mislead.

The explainer covers the doctrine and the equitable-sharing loophole; the ranking places all 50 states. Reform statutes that leave the federal workaround open are the point worth arguing.

Most states passed reform statutes in the years after the decision, and they vary enormously in how much they actually restrict takings. Comparing the text against the score is the exercise.

Incarceration rate, sentencing policy, and the death penalty pull in different directions. Decomposing the category rather than citing the headline score is what separates an A paper from a B.

The explainer sets out which states have them and what procedural protections each attaches. The variation in ex-parte standards is the constitutional question.

Legalisation, decriminalization, and psilocybin are three separate maps that are often collapsed into one. Keeping them apart is half the analysis.

State RFRAs, vaccine exemptions, and general religious-exemption statutes are distinct instruments. Map which states have which before scoring anything.

Anti-SLAPP coverage and press shield laws vary from strong statutory protection to nothing at all. The states with neither are the ones worth writing about.

One-party versus two-party consent is a clean, well-defined state map and a reliably good short assignment on federalism in everyday life.

Compare the comprehensive consumer-privacy statutes against the narrower biometric laws. Whether the states are copying California or diverging is a live question with a real answer in the text.

Roughly twenty states have passed campus speech legislation. Testing the statutes against actual disinvitation and sanction records is a genuinely open research question.

Universal means every student is eligible to apply. It does not mean a funded seat exists. That gap between eligibility and access is the whole paper.

ESAs, vouchers, and tax-credit scholarships are three different funding mechanisms with different legal exposure. The explainer separates them; the ranking places every state.

Notification, testing, and curriculum-approval requirements form a natural ordinal scale from no oversight to near-approval. Building that scale is the methods contribution.

The country index runs on the same ten categories, blended from Fraser, Freedom House, V-Dem and the World Justice Project. Decomposing the US score by category shows exactly which components pull it down.

The scales are built to be comparable, with the caveats stated. Placing a state into the country ranking is a vivid framing — and defending the comparison is the harder, better half.

Pull the country CSV and correlate the governance categories against the economic ones. The outliers — high economic freedom with weak civil liberties — are where the argument is.

Itemized FEC contribution records are attached to each official, broken down by donor, geography, and contribution size. Out-of-state funding share is a standard and defensible metric.

STOCK Act periodic transaction reports are matched to tickers and sectors. Cross-referencing a trade date against a committee action or a floor vote is the classic version of this investigation.

Disclosure coverage varies enormously by state, and that variation shapes what any researcher can even see. A paper about the gaps in the data is a legitimate paper about the data.

This is the best question on the page, and the site publishes its own answer: a full sensitivity analysis showing how the ranking moves as the ten weights change. Reproduce it, then break it.

Run a correlation matrix on the ten category columns, then a principal component analysis. If two categories load on the same component, the composite is weighting one idea twice.

Recompute the composite from category ranks instead of scaled scores and measure the rank correlation against the published order. Any state that moves more than a few places needs explaining.

Use the published policy-variable catalog as a worked example: each variable carries its weight, its rationale, and its source, defined before any state was scored on it.