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Pockets of Expertise: Institutional Capacity in Twentieth-Century State Legislatures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2008

Nancy Burns ,
Laura Evans ,
Gerald Gamm  and
Corrine McConnaughy
Nancy Burns
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
Laura Evans
Affiliation:
University of Washington and Harvard University
Gerald Gamm
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
Corrine McConnaughy
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Abstract

We examine the development of legislative capacity in U.S. state legislatures in the twentieth century. This capacity can be derived from the legislators themselves, or from institutions and practices. We consider both sources as we provide an account of the ragged and piecemeal development of legislative capacity in the states. We argue that most state legislatures have been neither entirely professional nor amateur, but rather have existed somewhere in between, in a place where pockets of expertise fill in for professional capacity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , Fall 2008 , pp. 229 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

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17. Of course, there's a second reason to be interested in this question, a reason tied more tightly to the legislative literature, and to a concern about which comes first, professional institutions or long careers. Some state politics scholars have suspected that professionalization of the organization—especially seniority systems—might lead to careerism of its members. See Moncrief, Gary F., “Professionalization and Careerism in Canadian Provincial Assemblies: Comparison to U.S. State Legislatures,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 19(1) (1994): 33–48Google Scholar; and Squire, “The Theory of Legislative Institutionalization and the California Assembly,” 1026–54.

Scholars have suggested that the Baker v. Carr apportionment decision might have caused the development of more professional institutions. See Thompson and Moncrief,Changing Patterns in State Legislative Careers. Or, perhaps, simple population growth was enough to push the change toward professionalism. See Rosenthal, Alan and Forth, Rod, “The Assembly Line: Law Production in the American States,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 3(2) (1978): 265–91Google Scholar. Scholars of national legislatures have tended to argue that the causal arrow runs in the opposite direction, that careerism comes before professionalization. See H. Douglas Price, “Careers and Committees in the American Congress”; and Epstein, David, Brady, David, Kawato, Sadafumi, and O'Halloran, Sharyn, “A Comparative Approach to Legislative Organization: Careerism and Seniority in the United States and Japan,” American Journal of Political Science 41(3) (1997): 965–98Google Scholar. Careerism, these scholars argue, might come from a decline in partisan competition, the adoption of the Australian ballot, institutional changes within the House of Representatives, or all three of these things. See Price, H. Douglas, “The Congressional Career—Then and Now,” in Congressional Behavior, ed. Polsby, Nelson W. (New York: Random House, 1971)Google Scholar; Katz, Jonathan N. and Sala, Brian R., “Careerism, Committee Assignments, and the Electoral Connection,” American Political Science Review 90 (1996): 21–33Google Scholar; Polsby, “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” 144–68; and Brady, David, Buckley, Kara, and Rivers, Douglas, “The Roots of Careerism in the U.S. House of Representatives,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 24(4) (1999): 489–510Google Scholar. Once in place, according to these theories, careerism drives legislatures to become professional. Of course, the answer to this question of which comes first depends deeply on conceptualization of career and professionalism and on just how we come to measure these two concepts.

18. The exceptional years for Alabama are 1880, 1907, 1919, 1939, 1959, and 1979; for California, 1903; for Montana, 1923 and 1963; for New York, 1883; for Vermont, 1886 and 1900; and for Virginia, 1920, 1942, and 1960. The final year for all states is 1997 because this was the most recent year for which data were available when our original data collection began.

19. Using the rosters—and The Book of the States—to create Table 1a was especially difficult work; it required locating the rosters, state by state, then comparing the target year's roster to every preceding year's roster, until we found two consecutive years in which no legislator from the target year had served. In many cases this meant going back in time for as many as ten or even twenty earlier sessions. See The Book of the States (Lexington, KY: Council of State Governments, 1926, 1960, 1980, 1994).

20. See Hyneman, “Tenure and Turnover of Legislative Personnel,” 21–31; Zeller, Belle, American State Legislatures: Report of the Committee on American Legislatures, American Political Science Association (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1954)Google Scholar; Lockard, Duane, “The State Legislator,” in State Legislatures in American Politics, ed. Heard, Alexander (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966)Google Scholar; Ray, David, “Membership Stability in Three State Legislatures: 1893–1969,” American Political Science Review 68 (1974): 106–12Google Scholar; Rosenthal, Alan, “And So They Leave: Legislative Turnover in the States,” State Government 47 (Summer 1974): 148–52Google Scholar; Rosenthal, Alan, “Turnover in State Legislatures,” American Journal of Political Science 18 (1974): 609–16Google Scholar; Shin, Kwang S. and Jackson, John S. III, “Membership Turnover in U.S. State Legislatures: 1931–1976,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 4 (1979): 95–104Google Scholar; Niemi, Richard G. and Winsky, Laura R., “Membership Turnover in U.S. State Legislatures: Trends and Effects of Districting,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 12 (1987): 115–23Google Scholar; Moncrief, Gary F., Niemi, Richard G., and Powell, Lynda W., “Time, Term Limits, and Turnover: Trends in Membership Stability in U.S. State Legislatures,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 29 (2004): 357–81Google Scholar.

21. Zeller, American State Legislatures; Lockard, “The State Legislator”; Rosenthal, “And So They Leave,” 148–52.

22. Shin and Jackson III, “Membership Turnover in U.S. State Legislatures,” 95–104; Niemi and Winsky, “Membership Turnover in U.S. State Legislatures,” 115–23; Moncrief, Niemi, and Powell, “Time, Term Limits, and Turnover,” 357–81.

23. Ray, “Membership Stability in Three State Legislatures,” 106–12; Hyneman, “Tenure and Turnover of Legislative Personnel,” 21–31.

24. Data collected for this paper are shown in bold type. The decision rule in Table 1a is the same as that articulated by Shin and Jackson, Hyneman, and Zeller. See Shin and Jackson, “Membership Turnover in U.S. State Legislatures,” 95–104; Hyneman, “Tenure and Turnover of Legislative Personnel,” 21–31; and Zeller, American State Legislatures. Lockard does not specify a decision rule, though his use of the phrase “first-term members” suggests that he also defined turnover in this fashion. See Lockard, “The State Legislator.” Thus in Table 1a the data for 1925–35 come from Hyneman, and data for 1950 come from Zeller, both of whom appear to have collected their data directly from clerks in the legislatures they studied; we present these two columns of data in roman type. See Hyneman, “Tenure and Turnover of Legislative Personnel,” 23; and Zeller, American State Legislatures, 66–67. Data for 1931–40, 1941–50, 1951–60, and 1961–70 come from Shin and Jackson and data for 1963–64 come from Lockard, all of whom drew on lists of legislators appearing in The Book of the States. See Shin and Jackson, “Membership Turnover in U.S. State Legislatures,” 97–99; Lockard, “The State Legislator”; and The Book of the States. It appears that these latter sources—which we present in italics—overstate legislative turnover. The decision rule in Table 1b is the same as that used by Niemi and his coauthors in their work. See Moncrief, Niemi and Powell, “Time, Term Limits, and Turnover,” 361–63. According to this method, legislators who did not appear on the previous year's roster were coded as new legislators. Thus in Table 1b the data for 1971–80 come from Niemi and Winsky, who relied on rosters in The Book of the States. See Niemi and Winsky, “Membership Turnover in U.S. State Legislatures: Trends and Effects of Districting,” 116–19; and The Book of the States. Data for 1981–90 and 1991–2000 come from Moncrief, Niemi, and Powell, drawn from The Book of the States and the State Directory of Elected Officials. See Moncrief, Niemi and Powell, “Time, Term Limits, and Turnover,” 364–65; and The Book of the States, 1926, 1960, 1980, 1994.

25. Thus, the decrease in turnover was in place before the legislative reforms of the 1960s and 1970s.

26. See The Book of the States, 1926, 1960, 1980, 1994.

27. While the data that we have gleaned from legislator biographies should generally be quite accurate, they would, if anything, slightly exaggerate the number of first-term legislators. It is possible that legislators might occasionally neglect to mention a term or two of previous service in their biographies (thus leading us incorrectly to code the legislator as a first-term member), but it seems unlikely that someone would invent previous terms of service. See, The Book of the States, 1926, 1960, 1980, 1994; Hyneman, “Tenure and Turnover of Legislative Personnel,” 21–31; Zeller, American State Legislatures; Lockard, “The State Legislator”; Shin and Jackson III, “Membership Turnover in U.S. State Legislatures,” 95–104; Niemi and Winsky, “Membership Turnover in U.S. State Legislatures,” 115–23; Moncrief, Niemi, and Powell, “Time, Term Limits, and Turnover,” 357–81.

28. The Book of the States, 1926, 1960, 1980, 1994.

29. One of the three exceptions is Massachusetts, and, given the rest of our dataset, the 1941 figure for Massachusetts seems itself to represent an aberrant year for the state.

30. Through random chance, we would expect any particular year to have an equal likelihood of being higher or lower than an average of nearby years, but not to be biased in one direction. That is, in fact, the case with the post-1970 period, where the numbers we report in bold are similar to those reported in Niemi and Winsky and Moncrief, Niemi, and Powell. See Niemi and Winsky, “Membership Turnover in U.S. State Legislatures: Trends and Effects of Districting;” and Moncrief, Niemi, and Powell, “Time, Term Limits, and Turnover.” A comparison of the 1981 figure to the data that Niemi and his coauthors report for 1971–80 and 1981–90 shows exactly the pattern that one would hope to find. The 1981 figure falls between the 1971–80 and 1981–90 figures for six of the thirteen states. Of the remaining seven states, the 1981 figure is higher in three cases and lower in four cases. In comparing our dataset to the data reported in Moncrief, Niemi, and Powell, we had access not only to the published data but also to the raw, year-by-year, data that Moncrief, Niemi, and Powell originally collected. See Moncrief, Niemi, and Powell, “Time, Term Limits, and Turnover.” Our data for 1997 are virtually identical to Moncrief, Niemi, and Powell's data for that year, once we account for special elections and midterm appointments.

31. Such data have not previously been available for so many states and years.

32. The five states with high percentages of freshman legislators in 1961—Alabama, Montana, Nebraska, Texas, and Vermont—were also the five states where the average previous service was still less than two terms.

33. Jon Teaford highlights two eras when a number of states were adjusting legislative organization: the 1960s—as is well known—and the 1940s as well. Massachusetts, for one, convened a legislative study commission in the 1940s. See Teaford, Jon, The Rise of the States: Evolution of American State Government (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 160–63, 199–201Google Scholar.

34. Peverill Squire, “The Contours of American Legislative Professionalization, 1910–2003” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Oakland, CA, March 17–19, 2005).

35. Our data on state legislative pay are inconsistent with a story of a revolution in legislative salaries in the 1960s and 1970s.

36. Thompson and Silbey, “Research on 19th Century Legislatures,” 331.

37. The Book of the States (1926, 1960, 1980, 1994).

38. New York Red Book (1901), 182.

39. New York Clerk's Manual (1920), 422.

40. Squire, “The Contours of American Legislative Professionalization,” 6.

41. Squire, “The Contours of American Legislative Professionalization.”

42. To carry out this analysis, we determined whether the chair was the most senior member of the majority party on the committee and we noted how many prior terms the chair had served in the assembly. We looked across a range of committees, some big and important, some small.

43. We have completed a less-detailed examination of Alabama and Michigan, and the results in those two states are identical to the ones we report here.

44. To compile these tables, we compared committee rosters to individual-level data collected (and reported above) for legislators in each of these states. “Appropriations Committee” data for Illinois are for the Appropriations Committee (1881–1981) and the Appropriations/Education Committee (1997); data for New York are for the Ways and Means Committee, which has long functioned as both an appropriations and a taxation committee; and data for Vermont are for the Ways and Means Committee (1900) and the Appropriations Committee (1941–1997). “Taxation Committee” data for Illinois are for the Revenue Committee, and data for Vermont are for the Land Taxes Committee (1900) and the Ways and Means Committee (1941–1997).

45. While we affirm the importance of reforms in the 1960s and 1970s, we find evidence of dramatic diversity among American state legislatures throughout the twentieth century, both before and after the reform era. By the time of those reforms, several states had already assumed the character of professional, full-time legislatures. And many other state legislatures never adopted these new reforms, remaining amateur—but not necessarily inexperienced—bodies to this day.

46. We can show this with cross-lagged statistical models.

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