State Legislative Chambers Research Articles

Political polarization and state government bonds

This study examines the effect of political polarization in state legislatures on state bond yields in the United States. Political polarization, defined as the ideological divide between Democratic and Republican members of the state legislative chambers, reflects legislators' willingness to seek bipartisan compromises. We expect high polarization states to be riskier because they are likelier to experience gridlock, negatively affecting economic development and debt service commitment. Findings suggest a significant positive relation between bond yields and political polarization. A one-standard-deviation increase in polarization increases bond yields by 7.81 basis points and total interest expense by $2.3 million for an average bond issue. Additionally, this study finds that the effect of polarization on bond yields is stronger for general obligation bonds.

Time, money, and support: Exploring young adult representation in state legislatures

The underrepresentation of young adults in legislative bodies in the United States represents a democratic deficit. Nonetheless, little is known about the factors that shape their underrepresentation in this context. In this article, I examine the severity of young adults' underrepresentation in U.S. state legislatures and explore how four institutional mechanisms help to explain representational variations across the states. I demonstrate that 1) young adults in the voting age population are underrepresented in state legislative lower chambers by an average factor of 3, but that some states are better performers than others for the period 2018–2022; 2) a combination of institutional arrangements can positively impact young adults’ descriptive representation: the harmonization of voter and candidate age requirements, increased legislative professionalism, and the use of term limits and single-member districts. This article thus contributes both to our knowledge of young adult representation in a critical case and to the scholarship on subnational politics.

What Explains Party Unity? Evidence from U.S. State Legislatures

Party unity is central to studying legislative politics and explaining the organization of legislative chambers, passage of policy, and even electoral outcomes. Its effect has been shown at the subnational, national, and international levels. While party unity has been used to explain many phenomena in legislative politics, there is much less known about the determinants of party unity, especially at the subnational level. We leverage a dataset of party unity in 95 U.S. state legislative chambers from 2002 to 2014, to test the impact of party structures, institutional rules, and contextual factors on the level of party unity. We find that majority status, party seat share, and the other party's unity impact party unity similarly for both parties, but the effect of inter‐party heterogeneity differs by party. These findings offer a new and unique insight to how partisan theories operate differently within state legislative versus Congressional parties.

Conference Committee Structure and Majority Party Bias in U.S. States

AbstractHow representative are conference delegations in state legislative chambers? I argue that differing conference rules across state legislative chambers influence majority party control over conference delegations. With an original data set encompassing all state-level conference committees from 2005 to 2016, I compare the observed policy preferences between conference delegation and majority party medians when the majority party unilaterally appoints and when the minority party has influence over conferee selection. My results show that in state legislative chambers where the minority can influence conference appointments, delegations are ideologically biased away from the majority party. These findings underscore how majority parties are limited when minorities have procedural rights.

Allocating Costly Influence in Legislatures

Committee seats endow holders with both policy influence and labor obligation. These benefits and costs present the organizational majority with an interesting choice: how many seats should it allocate to the opposition? We present a theoretical framework for understanding the allocation of committee seats by the majority coalition that incorporates both procedural and electoral concerns in the decision calculus and predict that when the majority is strong, the minority will be overrepresented on committees, but when the majority is weak, the minority will be underrepresented. Mechanistic, institutional, and contextual moderators to this choice framework are also discussed. We test our predictions by examining original data on the composition of over 2,000 committees across 98 American state and federal legislative chambers. The analysis yields strong support for our central predictions while suggesting interesting and intuitive contextual constraints on the majority’s tendency to exploit its position.

Income Inequality and Party Alternation: State-Level Evidence from the United States

This paper investigates the relationship between income inequality and political party alternation at the US state level using panel data from 1971 to 2015. We hypothesize that income inequality leads to more regime instability in the form of alternation of governors’ parties. We also test the similar hypothesis that income inequality affects the likelihood of a party gaining two-thirds control over state legislative chambers. The evidence from a panel fixed-effects model suggests that income inequality has a nonlinear relationship with gubernatorial-party instability. We also find a positive linear relationship between income inequality and political party instability when a governor’s party controls the state legislature. Finally, our results suggest that higher income inequality reduces the likelihood that Republicans will gain or maintain a two-thirds majority in either chamber of a state’s legislature, and we find a similar but weaker effect for Democrats in state senates. These results suggest that income inequality at the state level should be examined to understand the fiscal and other economic consequences that arise through its impact on party alternation and legislative control.

Marginalization and Mobilization: The Roots of Female Legislators’ Collaborative Advantage in the States

AbstractScholars have argued that female legislators are more prone to collaborate than their male counterparts. Though collaboration may be more or less evident in particular situations, we seek to more clearly establish the mechanism behind women’s collaborative activity using the framework of marginalization. In this paper, we use cosponsorship data from 74 state legislative chambers from 2011–2014 to analyze collaborative patterns and mobilizing institutions. We find female legislators are more collaborative than men, and that their collaborative advantage strengthens in chambers where women are systematically excluded from leadership positions. The advantage also extends to bipartisan collaboration, but only in less polarized settings with women’s caucuses. Furthermore, our findings imply that as women are integrated into leadership collaboration will actually decline, especially within their own party. We believe these results are important for understanding both the roots of collaborative behavior among female legislators and consequences of chambers that marginalize women from leadership positions.

When the local is national – A new high-water mark for nationalization in the 2018 United States state legislative elections

ABSTRACT The November 2018 state legislative elections continued the recent trend towards increased (dynamic) nationalization. Control of 87 state legislative chambers and many governor’s offices was determined by elections that took place in a highly nationalized environment in which voter choices were strongly shaped by support for or opposition to the national parties in general and President Donald Trump in particular. Nationalization reached a new peak in its influence on state legislative elections in 2018, while cross-state variation in the extent of nationalization was associated with legislative polarization and the quality of the state-legislative-information environment.

When Do Low Roll Rates Indicate Party Influence? Evidence from Counterfactual Roll Rates

A simulation‐based counterfactual is one way to solve the observational equivalence challenge that seemingly “partisan” majority‐party roll rates can be observed in the absence of any actual party influence. We simulate no‐partisan‐agenda‐control counterfactual roll rates and apply them across sessions of the US House of Representatives and 86 state legislative chambers to evaluate the extent to which observed roll rates provide evidence for party influence on the legislative agenda. After assessing and controlling for the baseline risk of majority‐party rolls, there is significant evidence of party influence on roll rates in some state legislatures, particularly those with rules that grant parties more agenda power, and in the post‐Reed’s‐rules House of Representatives. Institutional rules interact with the (simulated) risk of a majority roll to shape observed roll rates across chambers and across time.

Lobbying across the USA: from state vetoes to federal venues

Drawing on the veto player and multilevel lobbying literatures, the article analyzes the impact of policymaking vetoes on cross-territorial lobbying patterns. This comparative study of the American states finds that the incidence of federal lobbying by state interest groups and corporations is higher from states with divided government. Federal lobbying is higher also from states with unified Democratic Party control. The findings of a two-level statistical analysis of Lobbying Disclosure Act data from 2005 to 2015 suggest that subnational actors partially redirect their lobbying effort to the federal level when state policymaking channels are blocked. The empirical analysis builds on a multilevel interactive game and is supported further by a case study of lobbying patterns that followed the 2010 elections, when the Republican Party gained control of many state legislative chambers. Future research on lobbying in multilevel polities must simultaneously consider the relative powers of government levels and the partisan control of those levels.

Representation, Competing Principals, and Waffling on Bills in US Legislatures

Legislators are often placed in the position of representing the interests of their constituents against the preferences of their own party leaders. We develop a theoretical framework indicating that these cross‐pressured legislators are more likely to initially support legislation and subsequently change their minds than are legislators whose constituents and leaders share similar preferences. Moreover, we expect this pattern to be most pronounced among members of majority parties than minority‐party members. We test our expectations using data on bill cosponsorship and final passage votes from 46 lower state legislative chambers and the US House, finding considerable support for our theory.

On Measuring Legislative Agenda‐Setting Power

We propose a typology for measuring agenda‐setting success and failure in a legislative context. Our typology goes beyond the most commonly used measure (“rolls”) and includes the full range of agenda‐setting outcomes—rolls (opposing a proposal that subsequently passes), as well as “blocks” (opposing a proposal that is subsequently defeated), “successes” (supporting a proposal that subsequently passes), and “disappointments” (supporting a proposal that is subsequently defeated)—and thus takes into account instances of both positive and negative agenda power. We discuss these measures, and the theoretical questions surrounding them, with the hope of providing some guidance to scholars of the U.S. House, as well as those analyzing agenda power in other legislatures. As a first step in this direction, we explore variation in agenda‐setting measures in 85 American state legislative chambers, the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, and the Canadian House of Commons.

Who Represents the Interests of Undocumented Immigrants? A Study of State Legislators

Do elected officials represent those who lack voting rights and political power, specifically undocumented immigrants? While part of a legislator’s geographic constituency, undocumented immigrants provide little electoral benefits and thus are marginalized by most legislators. I present a theory of intersectional linked fate, positing that Latino legislators are responsive to undocumented Latino constituents, even when others are not. To test the theory’s expectations, I conduct the first field experiment and empirical examination of legislator responsiveness to undocumented persons. The results, based on representational choices in 28 U.S. state legislative chambers, indicate that legislators generally respond less to undocumented Latinos than Latino citizens, but that Latino legislators respond similarly to undocumented and citizen Latino constituents. The results also show a surprisingly high level of legislative responsiveness to undocumented immigrants. This study has important theoretical implications for representation, the definition of constituent, and what constitutes the meaning of democratic citizenship.

Gendered diffusion on gendered issues: the case of human trafficking

AbstractThis study aims to identify those factors that impact the comprehensiveness of state human trafficking legislation. To do so, we propose independent effects of policy diffusion and the percentage of females in a state legislature. Building on this framework, we then suggest a process of gendered diffusion, whereby female state legislators represent a unique diffusion network for “women’s interest” issues both within their own legislature, as well as across state networks. Taken together, this paper suggests that, for certain types of new issue areas, the demographic composition of state legislative chambers and the policy diffusion process are conditional on one another. This finding extends the bodies of scholarship concerning descriptive representation and policy diffusion, and presents a novel way to look at the policy-making process.

Parties, Median Legislators, and Agenda Setting: How Legislative Institutions Matter

A large literature in American politics argues that the procedural rules in Congress allow the majority party to block bills that are opposed by the majority of its members yet supported by the majority of the chamber. However, majority-party agenda-setting influence is rarely absolute. In this article, I use new data on the rules in the U.S. state legislative chambers to show that majoritarian rules (i.e., procedures that allow the chamber majority to circumvent majority-party gatekeeping) are not only common but also consequential for policy. That is, the presence of majoritarian rules significantly reduces the majority party’s advantage in obtaining its preferred legislative outcomes, particularly as the preferences of the floor and majority-party medians diverge. These results demonstrate that the distribution of power in a legislature is a function of its full configuration of agenda-setting rules and thus provide an important qualification to theories of legislation organization.

Legislative Organization and the Second Face of Power: Evidence from U.S. State Legislatures

A vast literature argues that the majority party in most legislatures enjoys a policymaking advantage through its access to gatekeeping institutions that let it block bills from reaching the floor. However, agenda-setting institutions vary substantially across legislatures. We propose that this variation should have demonstrable consequences for the majority party’s influence. In this article, we develop hypotheses about the institutional features of legislatures that enable the majority party to block bills. Then, we canvass all 99 U.S. state legislative chambers to measure whether those institutions are present and test whether they lower the rate at which the majority party is rolled. We find that in legislatures where majority-appointed committees can decline to hear bills or decline to report them to the floor, or where the majority leadership can block bills from appearing on the calendar, majority roll rates are significantly lower than in legislatures where those veto points are absent.

The Influence of Campaign Contributions on Legislative Policy

Although many think campaign donations buy influence from legislators, scholars have difficulty determining whether and how much influence contributions have in the legislative process. Many studies seek to identify the influence of donors on roll call votes. After considerable debate most scholars have concluded that donors have little influence on these votes. What voting studies cannot detect are the important, but less observable, opportunities to shape legislation that occur earlier in the legislative process. Although it is easy to identify the inadequacies of voting studies, it is difficult to find better approaches to study donors influence. I describe and critique the various methods that have been used to discern donor influence in the legislative process. I argue donor influence can be measured by combining several of these approaches. I illustrate this technique using my own work which studied the influence of contributions in the 99 state legislative chambers. I found little influence in some chambers and considerable in others. Features of institutional design and politics determine the amount of time legislators devote to fundraising and explain much of the variation in influence among the chambers. Rather than asking whether contributions have influence, we should ask when and where they have influence. I also discuss the extent to which contributions work in tandem with lobbying to influence the legislative process. Is the “access” or the “informational” model of lobbying correct? Finally, I examine whether campaign finance laws can lessen the influence of contributions, and discuss an agenda for future research.

Legislative Bipartisanship: Explaining Variation in Cross-Party Coalition Building Activity in the 99 State Legislative Chambers

While an extensive literature is devoted to the antecedents and consequences of party polarization and gridlock, almost no attention has been devoted to the individual legislator level foundations of these aggregate level phenomena. Here I examine the factors that determine the extent to which individual legislators spend time forming cross-party rather than within-party coalitions — coalition building bipartisanship. It is such individual actions shaped by institutions, elections, and citizen and elite preferences that determine collective outcomes, including party polarization and gridlock. Using a national survey of over 3000 state legislators, I find the time a legislator devotes to cross-party versus same party coalition building is determined by political context, such as divided versus unified government, and by features of institutional design, namely supermajority requirements, and leadership professionalization — the former increases bipartisanship while the latter decreases it. A legislator's behavior is also strongly influenced by ideology — moderates engage in more cross-party coalition building than more extreme members. The effect of ideology is an individual, not chamber level, effect — the magnitude of the ideological divide between the parties is relatively insignificant in determining individual behavior. Partisan political context is also a key determinant of the time a legislator devotes to cross rather than within party coalition building. Of course, members of the minority in a chamber engage in the most bipartisan activity — a member of the minority cannot succeed legislatively without being part of a bipartisan coalition. Members of the majority in a divided government state are also motivated to spend more time on bipartisan coalition building. And each responds differently to the majority party's margin of control in the chamber — increasing the majority party's margin of control decreases the bipartisanship of majority members while it increases that of minority members.

Representation in U.S. Legislatures: The Acquisition and Analysis of U.S. State Legislative Roll-Call Data

AbstractRoll-call data have become a staple of contemporary scholarship on legislative behavior. Recent methodological innovations in the analysis of roll-call data have produced a number of important theoretical insights, such as understanding the structure of congressional decisionmaking and the role of parties and ideology in Congress. Many of the methodological innovations and theoretical questions sparked by congressional scholarship have been difficult to test at the state level because of the lack of comprehensive data on various forms of state legislative behavior, including roll-call voting. The Representation in America's Legislatures project rectifies that problem through collection of comprehensive state legislative roll-call votes across all 99 state legislative chambers for the 1999–2000 and 2003–04 legislative sessions. In this article, we describe the data available through this project as well as our data acquisition procedures, including Stata and Perl programming and OCR of paper documents, with suggestions about how to use these methods to collect a wide range of state-level data.

Institutional Variation and Political Career Patterns: A Look at the Influence of Chamber Size in State Legislatures

State legislators routinely run for the state Senate after having served in the state House; however, this rarely occurs in the other order. Do members simply look to move up based on the conventional view of the political ambition ladder? Alternatively, do institutional reasons exist that make the Senate the preferred chamber? I examine the differences between the state legislative chambers and discuss institutional reasons why members may prefer the Senate to the House. Overall, I find chamber size is an important intra-institutional variable in explaining this variation along with the professionalism of the legislatures and term limits.