State funding remains one of the most prominent and debated issues confronting U.S. higher education. In this paper, the authors report the results of a longitudinal analysis of factors associated with state funding efforts for higher education. They begin by developing a conceptual framework that more closely integrates key state political indicators that have received insufficient attention in the past. The focus then turns to describing the construction of a panel data set and a fixed-effects analysis that the authors conducted on the drivers of state appropriations to higher education, measured as appropriations per $1,000 of personal income, over a period of nearly two decades, from 1984 to 2004. The concluding section identifies several findings providing distinctively new perspectives on patterns of state support for higher education over this period. (Contains 3 tables and 13 notes.)