Unsupervised legislators

A few years ago, Michael Gormley wrote a piece for USA Today mainly focusing on the Eliot Spitzer scandal but also mentioning that inappropriate behavior by state governing officials was far from unusual, especially when the capital was far from population centers. As Gormley wrote:

It is an open secret that there is a lot of fooling around going on at the statehouse. And at other statehouses, too.... In truth, the phenomenon is not new, and it's not confined to Albany. By all accounts, the same thing goes on at other state capitals, particularly where the statehouse is far from the main population centers and lawmakers stay overnight several times a week.

It is a curious feature of many states that the center of government is far from the center of commerce and population. (I had once heard that this was by design, to keep the government from becoming deaf to the concerns of the provinces. But I don't know how true that is or how much thought went into these decisions as a whole.) Could it be true that distance from population centers creates more irresponsible behavior by government?

A new paper by Filipe R. Campante and Quoc-Anh Do suggests this may just be the case. They find that a state capital's isolation corresponds with greater corruption, higher campaign spending, and lower voter turnout. Here's their abstract:

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states. In particular, this is the case when we use the variation induced by the exogenous location of a state’s centroid to instrument for the concentration of population around the capital city. We then show that different mechanisms for holding state politicians accountable are also affected by the spatial distribution of population: newspapers provide greater coverage of state politics when their audiences are more concentrated around the capital, and voter turnout in state elections is greater in places that are closer to the capital. Consistent with lower accountability, there is also evidence that there is more money in state-level political campaigns in those states with isolated capitals. We find that the role of media accountability helps explain the connection between isolated capitals and corruption. In addition, we provide some evidence that this pattern is also associated with lower levels of public good spending and outcomes.

(h/t John Sides)

When lawmakers just want to go home

I was sitting in on a caucus meeting of Colorado Senate Democrats the other day during the last day of the state's special legislative session. (Yes, legislative party caucus meetings in Colorado are, by law, open to the public.) Everyone had expected the session to wrap up that morning, but word had come from an absent senator that she could return the following day if someone would move to reconsider a marijuana DUI bill that had failed by a single vote the day before.

The reactions were quite interesting. Both party caucuses appeared already split on this issue, but the bill seemed to be losing support. Members had tried to pass the thing and fallen short, and they were not interested in prolonging their special session to address it yet again. This is a part-time legislature, and they had jobs, families, vacations, and lives to get back to.

But they couldn't state it quite like that. So one senator blasted the absentee senator for her irresponsibility, noting the "sacrifices" the rest of them had made to be present that week. Another suggested that they'd promised the people of Colorado that the special session would only be three days long, and to extend it to a fourth day would be breaking faith with their constituents.

Let me just say that I fully sympathize with part-time legislators being eager to end an already-extended legislative session. And while there might be good reasons to extend a session further, it wasn't obvious that this bill would pass, and it wasn't obvious that this bill was even necessary. (Can't the police already arrest someone driving dangerously regardless of the content of their blood? And isn't the main problem with stoned drivers the fact that they're driving really, really slowly around town looking for stores that sell Doritos after 2AM?)

But I found the language being used to dress up this legislative decision as a tad silly. The number of Coloradans outside the statehouse who are okay with a three-day special session but irate over a four-day one can probably be counted on two hands.

In general, there seemed to be a huge disconnect between what the legislators were saying and what I imagine most people outside the chamber were thinking. I wasn't sure if this was a case of legislators having no idea what non-political people think about, or if this was a case of trying to say "Can we go home yet?" in the most diplomatic possible language.

Legislative Leviathan (R - Highlands Ranch, CO)

Legislators and reporters gather around
Speaker McNulty late last night to
ask about bringing the chamber
out of recess.

If you weren't watching the proceedings of the Colorado House of Representatives last night, you missed quite a show. The Republican-controlled House is set to adjourn today, and a number of bills still remained on the calendar last night, one of which was a bill that would have allowed civil unions for same sex couples. The bill had already passed the Democratic-controlled Senate, and it had passed several Republican-controlled House committees with the help of some defecting Republicans. The governor had said he'd sign the bill. Whip counts showed that there were enough votes for it to pass the House.

So at around 9:30PM last night, Democrats moved to consider the bill on the House floor. Republican Speaker McNulty immediately moved the chamber into recess, preventing the consideration of any further legislative business. Despite lobbying by Governor Hickenlooper and Minority Leader Mark Ferrandino, McNulty kept the chamber in recess, effectively killing not only the civil unions bill but another 30 or so bills that were awaiting a floor vote. Spectators booed the Speaker, and the gallery was cleared after one shouted "I hope you all f-ing die!"

So, yeah, this is what legislative hardball looks like. And this is one of the down sides of investing a lot of power in a single chamber leader. There are plenty of advantages, of course -- a leaderless chamber would probably pass almost no legislation, and there's no guarantee that anything that passed would come close to reflecting public opinion. And strong leaders allow parties to be responsible; that is, they can better deliver on what they promise in their platforms and in campaigns. But here we see the costs: one strong leader can prevent a vote on a bill that would otherwise pass and become law, even one with strong public support. (Notably, in a chamber with even stronger legislative leaders, this bill might have never even made it to the floor. Colorado's GAVEL amendment guarantees that any bill that passes committee come to the floor.)

This is quickly becoming a rallying point for liberal activists in the state. Nonetheless, one might consider things from the Speaker's perspective: should he have allowed a vote on which he knew his side would lose? One is surely tempted to say yes, sure, that's democracy! But let's imagine a counterfactual for a second. Let's say that you were the Speaker and a bill was coming before you that would, I don't know, reinstate slavery, and you knew it would pass if it got a vote. Would you allow the vote in the name of democracy? Or would you use (even abuse) your powers as Speaker to prevent something evil from occurring?

I'm certainly not likening civil unions to slavery. I'm just suggesting that when a leader is invested with agenda controlling powers, it's hard not to use them when the stakes are high.

Politicians care about spelling and grammar

Last year, Dan Butler and David Broockman published an article showing that African American constituents who wrote to state legislators were less likely to receive a response than white constituents were. Jayme Neiman, a graduate student at the University of Nebraska, has applied this same framework to a new idea -- the quality of written correspondence. She details the results in her MPSA paper "Does Quality Matter? State Legislative Response to Constituent Communication."

Basically, she sent out e-mails to a random selection of state legislators across the country. Half received a well-written request for information on registering to vote, and the other half received a poorly-worded, poorly-spelled piece of drivel on the same topic. Neiman reports than 62 percent of the well-written e-mails received a response, while only 45% of the poorly-written ones did. Legislators were also more likely to respond themselves (rather than refer the letter to a staffer for response) to the well-written ones.

From my own experiences answering mail for politicians, poorly-written letters are less of a concern than crazy ones -- aliens, fluoride conspiracies, etc. But I admit that's a lot harder to operationalize in a study.

The peculiar issue of medical marijuana

I'm teaching a bit about medical marijuana in my state & local politics class this week. It turns out it's a really useful issue for understanding not only the conflicts between state and federal governments, but also between state and county governments. For a really nice review of the issue, check out Sam Kamin's article on medical marijuana in Colorado. As Kamin writes,

[Medical marijuana use] is seen as a serious felony (albeit an under-enforced one) at the federal level, as something akin to a constitutional right at the state level, and as either a nuisance to be regulated or as a tax source to be exploited at the local level. No other issue of the day -- not abortion, not alcohol, not prostitution, not gambling, not health care -- is treated quite so disparately by those various government entities that regulate it.

Imagine no campaign donations. It's easy if you try.

Imagine, for a moment, that you didn't need to raise money to run for office, that the government would pay you to run. Who would that help? Would it encourage more moderate candidates, who are usually pressured out of nomination contests by party money because they don't stand for anything? Or would it enable the extremists, whom are normally de-funded due to concerns about their toxic views?

Well, we actually don't need to imagine. Arizona and Maine had just such a system in place for state legislative elections during the last decade. So Michael Miller and I collected roll call votes from those states and compared those who first got elected through "clean" funding with those who achieved offices through traditional funding methods. We report the results in our new paper "Buying Extremists," which we're presenting next week at the meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Here's a summary of what we found:

• Clean-funded legislators were more ideologically extreme relative to their districts and parties than traditionally-funded legislators were.
• The extremism difference faded with time, with clean-funded legislators becoming socialized after several sessions to mirror the views of their traditionally-funded colleagues.

These findings suggest that it's the more ideologically extreme candidates who take advantage of clean funding to run for office. Under the traditional funding system, party donors function as gate-keepers, reducing the power of extreme candidates by channelling money away from them. Take away the gate-keepers, and it's the extremists who break through, contributing to the polarization of the legislature.

The extremism of elected officials

Nate Silver has a nice post up in which he compares the ideological stances of current governors with those of the voters they represent. I don't know too much about the OnTheIssues website, which Silver uses to determine governors' moderation/extremism, but assuming they're unbiased with regards to party, the resulting analysis is quite interesting. Silver ends up producing the following scatterplot:

What this demonstrates is that Democratic governors are responsive to voters' ideology; the more conservative the state, the more conservative governors' stances. Conversely, Republican governors appear to be completely unresponsive. No matter how liberal or conservative their state, they are advocating a strict conservative doctrine on a broad range of issues.

This graph reminds me a great deal of one that I produced for my book, comparing the ideal points of California legislators with the partisanship of their districts:

There's an important distinction here, though: in the California scatterplot, it's the Democrats who appear to be totally unresponsive to district sentiment, while Republicans actually behave more moderately when they represent more moderate voters.

One of the things Hans Noel and I argued in a recent paper was that a majority party would tend to have elected officials that were more ideologically extreme relative to their voters than the minority party would. There is an incentive, we argued, for minorities to moderate in an effort to win back control, while majorities seek to push their advantages to achieve as many of their policy preferences as possible while they're in power. If this applies to governors, as well, that's pretty interesting. After all, governors aren't really part of a national legislative chamber, so sticking together doesn't really produce an obvious policy payoff.

There are a number of reasons why the current crop of Republican governors might be more extreme than their Democratic counterparts or than Republican governors in earlier years. 2010 really was an unusual election. But what the above graphs demonstrate pretty clearly is that while the parties may be equally extreme in the long run, this extremism varies significantly by party from year to year. Sometimes Democrats really are more liberal than Republicans are conservative. Right now, it looks like the Republicans are the more extreme party.

Is West Virginia legally a state?

Susan Schulten has a great post up about the birth of West Virginia (a.k.a. Kanawha) during the Civil War. But one thing I remain a bit fuzzy on is just how West Virginia legally became a state. Note Article 4, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution:

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress. (Emphasis added)

West Virginia was formed from part of Virginia. According to the Constitution, Virginia's legislature would have had to accede to that, which would have meant the largest state in the Confederacy ceding a quarter of its territory to its enemy. Needless to say, that didn't happen. As I understand it, a Union occupation government in Virginia's northwestern counties simply declared itself to be the legitimate government of Virginia and passed the statehood resolution.

The Constitution doesn't offer the federal government the power to slice apart states to create new ones in the event of insurrection. So I'm wondering how this is even legal. Anyone?

Update: A reader points me to this amazing, if slightly tortured, defense from Abe Lincoln:

The consent of the Legislature of Virginia is constitutionally necessary to the bill for the admission of West Virginia becoming a law. A body claiming to be such Legislature has given its consent.... The division of a State is dreaded as a precedent. But a measure made expedient by a war, is no precedent for times of peace. It is said the admission of West Virginia is secession, and tolerated only because it is our secession. Well, if we can call it by that name, there is still difference enough between secession against the Constitution, and secession in favor of the Constitution.

The whole thing is worth a read.

What's the matter with the states?

Betsy Russell chronicles some interesting goings-on in state legislatures of late in a recent article in the Spokesman-Review:

Montana lawmakers backed a bill to let local sheriffs stop federal law enforcement officers from making arrests in their counties, though the governor vetoed it. They also debated measures to legalize hunting with a hand-thrown spear and declare global warming “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana.”

Florida legislators outlawed droopy pants on schoolkids that show their underwear. Illinois made it legal to pick up road-killed animals for food or fur, saying it’ll clean up the roads.

Utah lawmakers ordered schools to teach kids that the United States is a “compound constitutional republic” rather than a democracy, after the bill’s sponsor said “schools from coast to coast are indoctrinating children to socialism.” South Carolina looked at setting up its own gold or silver currency in case the Federal Reserve system fails. And a Georgia lawmaker pushed unsuccessfully to abolish drivers licenses because he said requiring them violates people’s “inalienable right” to travel.

What's going on lately? I'm pleased to report that Russell interviews no fewer than four political scientists (including yours truly) in an attempt to answer this question. My contention is that the recent Tea Party movement has encouraged people to run for office who wouldn't normally be interested in politics. Many of these candidates had little or no background in the traditional Republican Party, and since it was a good year for Republicans in general, many of them just wound up in office. The issues they're advocating aren't necessary Republican or even Tea Party issues per se, but they're the issues of outsiders who are new to politics and government. Whether they're crazy or thinking outside the box is really just a matter of perspective.

There's some nice arguments from Thad Kousser, Alan Rosenthal, and Gary Moncrief in there. Check it out.

State legislative seats are cheap, except where they're not

Source

You never forget your first negotiation

From the Denver Post:

A GOP state senator admitted Wednesday that the redistricting maps Republicans drew were deliberately tweaked to give their side an advantage.

Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, said Republicans started out drawing a fair map but then got wind that Democrats were "up to something."

"We're thinking, OK, they're trying to screw us, so we better come back with a new offer that is skewed to the right so that when we start negotiating and we come back to the middle it's a little closer to something that would be even," he said.

Um, yeah. Negotiations work like that sometimes. In other news, political candidates sometimes insult each other during campaigns even though they bear no personal animus towards each other.

For want of a retina, the majority crumbles

An amazing story out of the Colorado statehouse illustrating the dangers of narrow majorities: State Rep. Larry Liston, a Republican from Colorado Springs, just had surgery for a detached retina. His ophthalmologist told him he's not allowed to go above 7,000 feet for the next two weeks while it heals. This means he can't drive up to the Capitol in Denver, as I-25 exceeds that altitude at one point.

With Liston, the Republicans have a 33-32 majority. Now, the chamber has no majority party for the next two weeks, with just 2 1/2 weeks left in the legislative session. And there's a lot of legislative business still to finish. Add to that the fact that Democrats control the state senate and the governor's office, and there's a lot of pressure on Liston's retina.

(h/t Scott Adler)

Aye, aye, oh God aye!

I'm currently reading what may be the most erotic depiction of legislative procedure ever committed to ink:

I'll have what they're having.

Does Solitaire threaten our country?

Hmm, this photo seems to be making the rounds on blogs and e-mail threads:

Here's the accompanying text:

House Minority Leader Lawrence F. Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk, pictured standing, far right, speaks while colleagues Rep. Barbara Lambert, D-Milford and Rep. Jack F. Hennessy, D-Bridgeport, play solitaire Monday night as the House convened to vote on a new budget. (AP)

The guy sitting in the row in front of these two....he's on Facebook, and the guy behind Hennessy is checking out the baseball scores. 

These are the folks that couldn't get the budget out by Oct. 1 (last year) , and are about to control your health care, cap and trade, and the list goes on and on…. 

Should we buy them larger screen computers - or - a ticket home, permanently? 

This is one of their 3-DAY WORK WEEKS that we all pay for (salary is about $179,000 per year).

Okay, it is a funny picture, and it very well could be real. A few points, though. First, this is the Connecticut statehouse, not the U.S. Congress. And legislators there are only paid $28,000 per year. I'm not saying that justifies goofing off, but whoever wrote this text clearly thinks this is the U.S. Congress.

Also, if you've ever served on a committee or attended a seminar of any sort, you know how boring business can be at times. Solitaire and Facebook strike me as pretty minor offenses, and they don't necessarily impact productivity, particularly when the only other thing members might be doing at that time is listening to some other member go on and on about a youth baseball team in his district. Still, it's bad form to be photographed doing this.

Bigger or smaller chambers?

Dan Smith points me to this recent item in Stateline:

Nebraska is the only state with a unicameral Legislature, and lawmakers there are debating what size it should be. Competing bills call for increasing or decreasing the number of seats. Senator Bob Krist would like to decrease the number from 49 to 45 in order to save money. But Kate Sullivan would like to see Western Nebraska acquire an additional seat, making the Legislature an even 50. Minnesota, too, is debating its size. Bills in both chambers would eliminate 11 Senate and 22 House seats; currently the House has 134 seats and the Senate 67.

As it happens, I was recently speaking with someone in Nebraska who used to be very involved in the state government and is highly critical of the small size of the legislature there. He argued that having only 49 legislators makes it very easy for lobbyists to control the place. It's easy for them to know every legislator quite well and to build majority coalitions.

Personally, I would have thought the opposite would be true. A small legislature means that reporters and voters can relatively easily follow events in the chamber, which makes things somewhat harder for lobbyists, who thrive on voter ignorance.* A very large legislature, spread across multiple chambers, however, provides lots of different players with different preferences and lots of barely visible veto points.

It may be that a small legislature is good for lobbyists who are trying to push legislation through, while a largely legislature is good for lobbyists who are trying to stop legislation.

At any rate, it sounds like the proposals currently under consideration in Nebraska wouldn't affect legislative performance all that much, although one could certainly see how they matter for representation of groups and areas that currently feel marginalized.


*I can see how this phrase might sound pejorative toward lobbyists. I certainly don't mean it that way. Nonetheless, there's a good deal of evidence suggesting that lobbyists are more powerful when voters have a harder time paying attention to politics. Legislators are understandably less likely to vote the way a powerful lobby wants them to if they believe there will be electoral consequences for it, and that can only happen when voters have information about their roll call records.

Wisconsin's parties

I'm kind of kicking myself that I haven't been devoting my sabbatical time to researching partisanship in the Wisconsin statehouse. As it happens, this is on my research agenda, just not for this year. I've been interested in the state for some time since -- like California, Colorado, Nebraska, and others -- Wisconsin is a state where Progressive anti-party traditions run strong yet the parties have developed ways of adapting to rules designed to weaken them. Wisconsin was home to the first open primaries and campaign finance restrictions, yet it has one of the most polarized legislatures in the country.

I don't have a full grasp on the sources of legislative partisanship in Wisconsin yet. I conducted some interviews with legislators and lobbyists there a few years ago, but I really have a lot to follow up on. The stories I was hearing from respondents suggested that the source of partisanship could primarily found within the chamber. There is a great deal of party discipline actually enforced by party leaders within the legislature. Now, that perspective could be an artifact of the location of my interviews -- Madison. But it's being backed up today. Bringing an entire party legislative caucus out of the state and keeping them there away from their families requires party discipline. Voting for a dramatic change in labor policy when public opinion screams not to requires party discipline.

In the next year or so, I hope to investigate this further. If, say, a Democratic Wisconsin senator were having second thoughts about continuing to hide in Illinois, what's keeping him there? Is it the fear of disappointing his colleagues? The fear of a recall by disappointed Democrats in his district? The fear of labor unions who would never back his campaign again? (Similarly, what fate will befall Sen. Dale Schultz, the one Republican who opposed the effort to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights?) I'm sure all of these things play a role, but I'm just kind of curious why party discipline is so much greater there than in almost any other state.

How legislators talk

Here's a lovely letter from Wisconsin's Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald to Democratic Senator Mark Miller, the minority leader, currently hiding somewhere in Illinois. An excerpt:

Your grasp of reality, and control of your caucus as minority leader, continues to amaze me.... Your stubbornness in trying to ignore the last election and protect the broken status quo is truly shameful. While we wait for you and your colleagues to finally show up, Senate Republicans continue to stand ready to do the job we were elected to do, here in Wisconsin. I hope you are enjoying your vacation, and your vacation from reality.

For the record, concerns about incivility among elected officials tend to be way overblown. Even if legislators don't like each other, they have longstanding rules and customs that allow them to address the people's business and make decisions about competing interests. I think it's fair to say that those rules are under considerable strain in Wisconsin right now.

(h/t Barry Burden)

Comparing politicians and their districts

Are elected officials good representatives of their districts? That's actually a difficult question for political scientists to answer, in part because our measures are poor. We have plenty of good measures of the partisanship of elected officials, most of them deriving from roll call votes. We also have good measures of the partisanship of voters, most of them deriving from surveys and election results. But directly comparing voters and politicians is hard when we don't have a common scale.

Hans Noel and I try to remedy this in a new article (gated or ungated, PDF) in Political Research Quarterly. Our approach is to examine votes on legislative referenda in California. That's when state legislators vote on a bill and then send the exact same text onto the voters -- it's one of the only times that voters and politicians are voting on precisely the same thing. We use these referenda votes as "bridges" between legislators and their districts. Then we can put legislators' roll call votes and districts' votes on initiatives onto the same scale and generate comparable ideal points for districts and legislators.

How do they look? Well, it looks like legislators are a lot more polarized than their districts. There are actually plenty of moderate Assembly districts in California; there are basically no moderate Assembly members. Virtually every Democrat in the Assembly is more liberal than her district; virtually every Republican member is more conservative than her district.

We also find that members of the majority party tend to deviate further from their districts than members of the minority party do. Time out of office, we suggest, causes the minority party to try to moderate to win back the majority.

Power: real and perceived

James Battista has a piece (gated) in the most recent State Politics and Policy Quarterly examining formal and perceptual power among leaders in the state legislatures. That is, he compares an index of actual formal powers of statehouse speakers (control of the legislative agenda, appointing committee chairs, etc.) with the results of a survey of legislators about how powerful they believe those speakers to be. The result? Essentially no correlation between the two.

This is an important reminder that there are important factors out there determining power besides formal rules. According to the formal rules, California should have among the weakest political parties in the country; it has the strongest. Similarly, if a legislative leader is determined and clever enough, and if the political culture allows it, strong leadership may emerge, regardless of what the rules officially dictate.

I regret that Battista's analysis excluded Nebraska, as I'm curious where that state would show up in the survey.

More on seating arrangements and voting

Just to expand on my previous post, a few years ago I wrote an article investigating the influence of legislative seating arrangements on roll call votes. We know there are all sorts of influences on the way legislators vote, including party leaders, the executive branch, constituents, etc. Did legislators also follow the votes of the people sitting near them?

Seating chart for the 1949
California Assembly

I investigated this using the California Assembly, where legislators sit in pairs. Usually, member-pairs are of the same party, but that wasn't always the case. The diagram at left shows the seating arrangements for the 1949 Assembly, with Republicans in gray and Democrats in white.

The paper finds that deskmates tended to vote together, even controlling for party, constituency preferences, and many other influences. Just sitting together made any given pair of legislators anywhere from two to six percent more likely to vote the same way.

All this is to say that Sen. Mark Udall isn't nuts when he claims that having senators sit together might change the way they behave. And he's not the first -- California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown used seating assignments to enforce party-line voting, to pair freshmen up with veterans for socialization purposes, and even to separate and punish those who conspired against him. I can't believe that sitting together for one 90-minute speech, as Udall is proposing, will make much of a difference, but the idea that neighbors can influence each other has some support.