Legislature Size and Party Unity (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Parties, Institutions, and Polarization in American State Politics

Abstract

While any number of rules and institutions may shape how legislatures function and legislators behave, the size of a legislature is fundamental to how it operates. Not only does legislature size correspond to district size, thus affecting the closeness of a representative’s relationship with his or her constituents, but it also shapes the need for intra-legislature institutions and norms that structure and shape legislative activity. The founders recognized the importance and difficulty of determining the size of legislative politics, with Madison dedicating Federalist No. 55, “The Total Number of the House of Representatives,” to the topic. Subsequent scholarship has examined the different influence and importance of party organizations in structuring debate in the more-unwieldy House of Representatives compared to the smaller Senate. In this project, we draw on historical state legislative data on legislative activity to examine the consequences of legislature size choices for the structure of legislative behavior. In particular, we take advantage of a number of states’ sudden and dramatic changes in the size of their lower legislative chambers and relate this to newly collected measures of legislative roll call voting to explore how legislature size affects party unity. Our results provide new evidence on the important role that the seemingly mundane choice of legislature size plays in shaping legislative representation.

Authors

• Jaclyn Kaslovsky, Rice University

• Michael P. Olson, Washington University in St. Louis