State Legislators' Professional Backgrounds and Their Legislative Effectiveness

• In Event: Legislative Effectiveness

Abstract

How do legislators’ professional backgrounds shape their legislative effectiveness? Existing work has examined how legislators’ professional backgrounds affect agenda-setting behavior (e.g., Hansen et al 2018) and shape their credibility and policy success on individual pieces of legislation (Makse 2022). In this paper, we take a broader view, considering how legislators’ pre-legislature occupations shape their overall legislative effectiveness in the institution. We expect that a legislator’s occupational background will influence (1) the stages of the lawmaking process in which they are most effective and (2) the legislative contexts in which their overall effectiveness is enhanced or reduced. To test these expectations, we draw on data from 1992-2018 that combines information on state legislators’ professional backgrounds (Makse 2019) and state legislators’ effectiveness scores (SLES) (Bucchianeri, Volden, & Wiseman 2020), along with additional information about legislative institutions and the lawmaking context.. The findings contribute to the literature on state politics, legislative effectiveness, and the professional backgrounds of legislators.

Authors

• Jacob Michael Lollis, University of Virginia

• Todd Makse, Florida International University