Playing Politics with Sex Offender Laws: An Event History Analysis of the Initial Community Notification Laws across American States

Despite a decline in crime rates, the 1990s witnessed extensive media coverage of several high-profile stranger abductions and murders of children. State legislators' swift response to the public's growing fear of sex offenders with the adoption of sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws raises questions about the role of politics. Punctuated equilibrium theory and the diffusion of innovation jointly provide a context to conduct an event history analysis to assess the extent to which politics enhanced legislative responsiveness to public opinion in SORN policymaking. Contrary to the commonly held belief that attributes legislative interest in SORN to salient crimes against children, the results suggest that factors such as the percentage of a conservative population, district-level competition, and state innovativeness accelerated the diffusion of innovation of the laws.