Legislative Effectiveness in the American States

• In Event: Creative More Effective Political Institutions

Abstract

What institutional structures cultivate effective lawmaking among particular legislators? A growing body of scholarship on the United States Congress has sought to answer this question, using new measures that capture the breadth, importance, and relative success of a legislator's portfolio, in order to identify the individual and institutional determinants of lawmaking effectiveness. Yet, despite a long history of research on legislative effectiveness at the state level, no such comprehensive measure exists for the state legislatures. In this paper, we introduce state legislative effectiveness scores for all 99 state legislatures from the early-1990s onward. We use these scores to explore the sources of state lawmaking effectiveness across states and over time. Our analysis demonstrates that there is significant heterogeneity in the value of being in the majority party and holding institutional positions of power across state legislative contexts. Indeed, while some state legislatures are relatively bipartisan and egalitarian in their approach to lawmaking, others are quite polarized and hierarchical. To identify the source of these differences, we also examine how they vary with institutional features of the lawmaking environment in each state. Collectively, our findings have broad implications for the study of legislative behavior and representation, and our new effectiveness scores provide countless research opportunities for state politics scholars.

Authors

• Craig Volden, University of Virginia

• Alan E. Wiseman, Vanderbilt University

• Peter Bucchianeri, Vanderbilt University