Government Growth and Professionalism in U.S. State Legislatures

This article analyzes the professionalization of American state legislatures since the 1960s and expands on previous studies by considering the strategic incentives of members. Fiorina and Noll's (1978a, 1978b) theory that reelection‐minded legislators serve as “ombudsmen to the bureaucracy” on behalf of their constituents suggests that legislatures have professionalized in response to growth in public spending in order to strengthen members' abilities to handle increased facilitation duties. I used longitudinal analysis and instrumental variables regression to test this hypothesis and disentangle causal directionality, since professional legislators may have the means and incentive to spend more than their citizen counterparts. Both methods revealed empirical support for the Fiorina and Noll hypothesis that spending increases caused legislators to become more professional.     

Do Term Limits Restrain State Fiscal Policy? Approaches for Causal Inference in Assessing the Effects of Legislative Institutions

Scholars of state politics are often interested in the causal effects of legislative institutions on policy outcomes. For example, during the 1990s a number of states adopted term limits for state legislators. Advocates of term limits argued that this institutional reform would alter state policy in a number of ways, including limiting state expenditures. We highlight a number of research design issues that complicate attempts to estimate the effect of institutions on state outcomes by addressing the question of term limits and spending. In particular, we focus on (1) treatment effect heterogeneity and (2) the suitability of nonterm‐limit states as good counterfactuals for term‐limit states. We compare two different identification strategies to deal with these issues: differences‐in‐differences (DID) estimation and conditioning on prior outcomes with an emphasis on synthetic case control. Using more rigorous methods of causal inference, we find little evidence that term limits affect state spending. Our analysis and results are informative for researchers seeking to assess the causal effects of state‐level institutions.     

Reelection and Legislative Power: Surprising Results from Brazil

A diverse and growing literature ties legislative professionalization and power to career paths. In particular, higher rates of reelection and longer legislative careers should produce more professional, competent, and high‐quality legislatures. Legislators have more incentives to strengthen their own institution when they intend to remain there for a long career. Using data from the most recent constitutional convention in Brazil, we show that legislators with greater prospects for long careers were actually less likely to support strengthening the legislative branch. We explain this as part of a local equilibrium where career legislators’ short‐term need for pork trumped their long‐term interest in a stronger institution.     

Electoral Institutions,the Personal Vote,and Legislative Organization

What is the relationship between electoral institutions and the internal organization of legislatures? Existing research on the U.S. Congress suggests that electoral incentives shaped by the candidate‐centered nature of congressional elections explain the emergence of strong committees in that legislature. Exploring the issue from a comparative perspective, it is argued that the impact of ballot structure on committee system structure is dependent on how legislators cultivate personal votes. Committees will be stronger when legislators supply fiscal legislative particularism (pork), but weaker when legislators cultivate support by delivering extra‐legislative constituency service. Statistical analysis, combining original data on committee design in 39 democratic legislatures with measures of ballot structure and mechanism to cultivate a personal vote (MCPV), confirms the expectation.     

When Voters Pull the Trigger: Can Direct Democracy Restrain Legislative Excesses?

Direct democracy is sometimes described as a “gun behind the door,” but how do legislators react when voters pull the trigger? Leveraging the high‐profile referendum defeat of a controversial law passed by the Ohio legislature, I examine how legislators respond to voter disaffection. Using interest groups to “bridge” votes before and after the election, I show that the measure's defeat induced moderation on the part of the Republican legislative majority, while leaving the behavior of opposition Democrats largely unchanged. The results suggest that direct democracy has the potential to restrain legislative excesses and alleviate polarization in state legislatures.     

Bargaining and Bicameralism

In bicameral legislatures, the protection of small states often motivates the malapportionment of the upper house. Using a legislative bargaining model, I show that malapportionment may produce the opposite effect. Under unicameralism, same‐state legislators are shown to not inherently be coordinated to cooperate, diminishing the fear of a big‐state conspiracy. By contrast, under bicameralism, preference complementarities enable upper‐house legislators to effectively coordinate their state delegations, and this skews the expected allocation in favor of big states. Hence, unless bicameralism significantly increases their agenda power, small states will fare even worse under bicameralism whenever they are disadvantaged under unicameralism.     

Examining Parties as Procedural Cartels: Evidence from the U.S. States

Procedural cartel theory states that the majority party exerts influence over legislative outcomes through agenda control. This research tests predictions from the party cartel theory in five state legislatures. I assess party influence through comparison of term‐limited and nonterm‐limited legislators. I argue that term‐limited legislators (who are not seeking elective office) are no longer susceptible to party pressure, making them the perfect means to determine the existence of party influence. The results demonstrate that party influence is present in these legislatures. I find that party influence is magnified on the procedural, rather than final‐passage, voting record which is precisely where procedural cartel theory predicts. I find lower levels of ideological consistency and party discipline among members for whom the party leadership offers the least—those leaving elective office. These results provide support for party cartel theory, demonstrating further evidence of how parties matter in modern democracies.     

The politics of discretionary Medicaid spending, 1980-1993

Why do some states choose to spend more than four times as much as others to provide health care to the disadvantaged? Political scientists who have traditionally explored this question by analyzing trends in overall Medicaid expenditures lumped states' discretionary spending in with other money that states are mandated to spend. Analyses of total expenditures found that socioeconomic factors drove spending but that party control of state legislatures made no difference in health policy making. By isolating discretionary state Medicaid expenditures from total spending figures, I reexamine the influences of political as well as economic and demographic factors. The often-doubted importance of party control becomes clear. This study investigates spending patterns in the discretionary portions of state Medicaid programs in forty-six states from 1980 to 1993 and analyzes both incremental program changes and absolute differences in state spending. To discover how greatly the researcher's choice of dependent variables can affect results, optional spending is separated from total spending levels and the variation is modeled in both. Focusing not on the spending that the federal government requires of state officials but on the policies that state officials actually choose allows a balanced exploration of both political and economic effects on welfare expenditures. This research also provides new insights about which forces will shape policy decisions if more and more control of the public health care system is devolved to the states.     

The Role of Ideology in State Legislative Elections

In this article, I examine the effect of incumbent ideology on elections in 45 state legislatures, showing that ideological extremists are more likely to be opposed in the general election than are moderates and that extremists tend to do worse in challenged elections than moderates do. I also explore the intervening role of legislative professionalism, finding that in the majority of state legislatures moderation is rewarded, though in the most professionalized legislatures, incumbents are actually rewarded for extremism. These results show that despite the informational disadvantage of the electorate, the ideology of state legislators is an important factor in elections.     

Opportunity Costs and Outside Careers in U.S. State Legislatures

Cost‐benefit models of career choice predict that potential legislators choose legislative careers when they expect greater utility from legislative service than from other options. In state legislatures, the utility of legislative service includes the monetary value of outside careers. I hypothesize that legislators are more likely to pursue outside careers when financial opportunity costs are higher or when they derive less non‐monetary value from legislative service. In particular, I posit that individual characteristics that predict labor market value (such as age, education, race, and sex) and legislative salary predict outside careers. I test this model employing a new dataset of individual outside‐career activity derived from financial disclosure reports. The findings strongly support the hypothesis that outside‐career behavior is a function of the financial opportunity costs of legislative service. In addition, I find that Republicans are more likely to hold outside careers than are Democrats. This research has important implications for the study of state legislative participation, legislative organization, and the Democratic bias hypothesis.     

Electoral Budget Cycles in Legislatures

This article examines electoral cycles in legislative budget decisions. Where local structures play an important role in candidate selection and election, legislators' incentives to amend the executive spending proposal can depend on the proximity of elections, leading to more spendthrift behavior in the run‐up to popular votes. However, stringent budget institutions can counteract this tendency. Using a unique dataset of executive spending proposals and approved budgets in Sweden, I find strong empirical support for these predictions. Future studies of electoral cycles should pay greater attention to separating the contributions of the legislative and executive stages of the budgetary process and the conditions that foster electoral cyclicality in legislatures.     

Re-election and political career paths in the Uruguayan Congress, 1985–99

Given the presumed marginal – or at best the ‘rubber-stamp legitimising’ – character of Latin American legislatures, they ‘have escaped careful scrutiny’. Even in cases where legislatures are supposed to play a much more significant role than the continental average, such as Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay, knowledge of legislative politics is still far from conclusive. This article studies re-election patterns of legislators in Uruguay during the four post-authoritarian elections. During these elections in Uruguay, we observed a decreasing but still high rate of turnover of legislators. These high rates of legislative turnover are affected by a significant number of legislators who do not seek re-election. While inter-party electoral volatility strongly influences the rates of incumbent re-election, intra-party volatility does not seem to have an impact on this phenomenon. Lastly, the closed and blocked lists in conjunction with the Uruguayan multiple simultaneous vote, and the fact that a legislator belongs to the Senate, are additional institutional features that help to explain the turnover and incumbent re-election in the legislature.     

A Bridge to Somewhere: Mapping State and Congressional Ideology on a Cross‐institutional Common Space

Researchers face two major problems when applying ideal point estimation techniques to state legislatures. First, longitudinal roll‐call data are scarce. Second, even when such data exist, scaling ideal points within a single state is an inadequate approach. No comparisons can be made between these estimates and those for other state legislatures or for Congress. Our project provides a solution. We exploit a new comparative dataset of state legislative roll calls to generate ideal points for legislators. Taking advantage of the fact that state legislators sometimes go on to serve in Congress, we create a common ideological scale. Using these bridge actors, we estimate state legislative ideal points in congressional common space for 11 states. We present our results and illustrate how these scores can be used to address important topics in state and legislative politics.     

Delegation and Defensive Legislative Strategies in Brazil

In the course of the legislative process, legislators choose how much policy discretion to delegate to the executive branch. Uncertainty about policy outcomes and bureaucratic intentions weighs heavily in such decisions. In Brazil, executive control over the budget creates uncertainty about the availability of discretionary spending, which results in comparatively high levels of delegation in the legislature's direct‐spending decisions. I demonstrate that sidelining the legislature from the budget in order to insulate government spending from political pressures diminishes the value of legislative work in Brazil and reinforces historical patterns of policymaking centered on the federal executive.     

Spreading Influence Through Weak Ties: Cosponsorship,Legislative Networks,and Bill Success in Fragmented Congresses

Literature on legislative success tends to focus on independent variables of which lawmakers have scarce control. This article analyzes instead how legislators’ strategies affect their success in Congress. I posit that while weak ties between congresspeople are the most useful in increasing success in the chamber of origin under majoritarian settings, they do not raise the likelihood of bill approval in the second chamber or in plurality‐led legislatures. Building on a data set that contains all bills proposed to the Argentine Congress between 1983 and 2007, results support these context‐dependence hypotheses. I then use data from the Uruguayan Congress (1995–2010) to explore how the argument plays out in a Latin American legislature with weaker gatekeeping rules (i.e., an “open sky” legislature). Findings help gain insight into the strategies used in environments different from that of the widely studied U.S. Congress.     

Electoral Institutions and Legislative Particularism

How do electoral institutions affect legislative behavior? Though a large body of theoretical scholarship posits a negative relationship between multimember districting and the provision of particularistic goods, empirical scholarship has found little evidence in support of this expectation. Using data on the provision of US post offices from 1876 to 1896, a period during which many states elected congressional representatives from at‐large districts, and a differences‐in‐differences approach, I find that counties represented by at‐large representatives received approximately 8% fewer post offices. The results have important implications for studying how electoral institutions affect incentives for legislative behavior.     

The Effects of Term Limits on State Legislatures: A New Survey of the 50 States

Term limits on legislators were adopted in 21 states during the early 1990s. Beginning in 1996, the limits legally barred incumbents from reelection in 11 states, and they will do so in four more by 2010. In 2002, we conducted the only survey of legislators in all 50 states aimed at assessing the impact of term limits on state legislative representation. We found that term limits have virtually no effect on the types of people elected to office—whether measured by a range of demographic characteristics or by ideological predisposition—but they do have measurable impact on certain behaviors and priorities reported by legislators in the survey, and on the balance of power among various institutional actors in the arena of state politics. We characterize the biggest impact on behavior and priorities as a “Burkean shift,” whereby term‐limited legislators become less beholden to the constituents in their geographical districts and more attentive to other concerns. The reform also increases the power of the executive branch (governors and the bureaucracy) over legislative outcomes and weakens the influence of majority party leaders and committee chairs, albeit for different reasons.     

Term Limits and Legislative‐Executive Conflict in the American States

State governments have experienced considerable institutional change in the last several decades. None appeared at first glance to be as far‐reaching as the legislative term limits that were adopted by over 20 states in the 1990s. The evidence to date suggests that term limits have indeed changed the character of many of the states' legislatures, if not always as predicted by their advocates. We report data on veto dynamics over the period 1989–2008 to determine how term limits have impacted legislative‐executive relations. Our data both challenge and support what has become the conventional wisdom, i.e., that term limits will weaken legislatures relative to their governors. States with more stringent term limits experienced fewer gubernatorial vetoes but proved more likely to override those vetoes when they were issued. Taken together the evidence suggests that the relationship between governors and legislatures in the wake of term limits is more complex and variable than scholars and others had previously thought.