Do Effective State Legislators Become Effective Lawmakers in Congress?

• In Event: Legislative Effectiveness and Representation

Abstract

What experiences contribute to a Representative or Senator becoming an effective lawmaker in Congress? One would naturally expect that previous legislative experience might help Representatives and Senators develop skills that they could employ to successfully advance their legislative agendas in Congress. In previous scholarship, Volden and Wiseman demonstrated that Representatives and Senators who previously served in highly professionalized state legislators were, ceteris paribus, more effective lawmakers in Congress than those with no prior state legislative experience. In this paper we draw on a new original data set on the legislative effectiveness of state legislators to explore whether highly effective state legislators (as measured by their state legislative effectiveness scores) who are elected to Congress are also highly effective lawmakers in the House and Senate. We also explore how the institutional structures of state legislatures and the positions that lawmakers hold within them help cultivate the skills needed to excel in Congress. Our findings raise the potential importance of looking to state legislatures for the next generation of highly-skilled lawmakers in Congress; and they speak to broader questions about the identification of candidate traits that are related to candidates’ likely lawmaking effectiveness in the U.S. Congress.

Authors

• Alan E. Wiseman, Vanderbilt University

• Craig Volden, University of Virginia

• Peter Bucchianeri, Vanderbilt University