Leadership Perception & Voting Behavior in the Nonpartisan Legislature

Abstract

Harlan Hahn's recent discussion of leadership in the Iowa legislature represents one of the first attempts to correlate leadership perceptions of legislators with actual behavior.1 A number of interesting conclusions and hypotheses emerged from the study which add to our understanding of the internal power relationships within legislative bodies. In particular, the one-party context of the Iowa House of Representatives allowed Hahn to examine the relationship between leadership and voting behavior in a body without strong party cohesion. It was discovered that, although important intraparty and factional leadership structures appeared, leadership perception was not limited to these kinds of structured bloc relationships. Representatives who nominated leaders from outside of their party or factional grouping were found to share the attitudinal and voting preferences of the external leaders they selected. Thus major departures from normal party or factional voting patterns could be identified by examining the interrelationships between key legislative issues and leadership perception. Implicit in Hahn's analysis is the proposition that in a legislature without stable party or factional alignments voting behavior and leadership perception will reflect shared attitudes on specific parts of the body's total policy agenda. This research note builds upon Hahn's analysis by examining leadership perception and its relationship to voting in a legislative setting almost totally free of party or pre-existing factional alignments. While undertaking a comparative study of recent state constitutional conventions we became intrigued by the internal political process of the Maryland Constitutional Convention (I967-I968). The Maryland Convention was of special interest as a legislative research laboratory. The delegates were selected by a nonpartisan electoral system and the Convention itself was organized internally on a consciously nonpartisan, almost antiparty basis. Delegates were seated alphabetically in the chambers to minimize party or regional coalescing. The Convention possessed all of the characteristics of a de novo deliberative body-without the traditions and backlog of behavior patterns that characterize most legislatures-composed of delegates whose only cues to behavior would