Legislative Professionalism and the Power of State House Leaders

Abstract

What effect does the professional character of a legislature have on the power of its legislative leaders? Despite legislative scholars' desire to better understand both institutional professionalism and leadership power, few empirical studies have explored the relationship between these two important elements of American state legislatures. Moreover, of the research that has been conducted, little effort has been made to understand the impact of professionalism on leadership from a theoretical perspective. This article expands our understanding of legislative professionalism and leadership while testing three theoretical models of legislative organization. I examine the effect of professionalism and several control variables on the influence of state house leaders in 38 non-southern states in 1981 and 1995. Contrary to the fears of some analysts, I find that more professional state legislatures tend to have more powerful leaders. These results provide support for a partisan model of legislative organization.

Measuring Gubernatorial Budgetary Power

“…Similarly, Woods and Bowman (2011) use the measure to consider data from 1960 to 2000 to analyze state compact participation. Political behavior Perception of responsibility for outcomes (Rudolph 2003) Confidence in state government (Kelleher and Wolak 2007) Bureaucracy Statutory control (Huber, Shipan, and Pfahler 2001) Divided government Change in state revenue (Alt and Lowry 2000) Conflict between governor and legislature (Clarke 1998) Legislative behavior Statehouse leadership power level (Clucas 2007) State policy Participation in interstate compacts (Bowman and Woods 2007) Environmental regulation (Daley, Haider-Markel, and Whitford 2007) Gubernatorial politics Governor's policy success (Ferguson 2003) Gender of the governor (Oxley and Fox 2004) Note: FPI = Formal Powers Index. This table represents only a sample of the articles published that rely on the FPI.…”

“…In part, this will best be answered over time, as scholars compare the two measures when conducting new studies or revisiting earlier analyses using the new measure. Here, we start this process by reassessing one of the numerous studies published in State Politics & Policy Quarterly (and elsewhere) that uses the FPI as an explanatory variable in a longitudinal analysis: Clucas (2007), which relies on the FPI to analyze data from 1981 to 1995. We present our replication in three parts.…”

“…Clucas's statistical tests show that the Professionalization and Majority Party Advantage variables are positive and significant, leading him to conclude that his analysis "provides support for the partisan theory of legislative organization in explaining the distribution of power in American legislatures" (15). Clucas (2007) uses the composite version of the FPI-which is the average of all the separate components of the index-as a control. 17 He reports that gubernatorial power does not have a significant effect on the power of legislative leaders, and the inclusion of this index does not affect the relationship between the dependent variable and other independent variables.…”

“…In 1995 ( Table 4, Model 8), the results are similar, although not exactly the same: including the index changes the significance of the Professionalization variable, although it has no other effect on the model. As Clucas (2007) controls for gubernatorial power using the composite version of the FPI, next we split the index into its key components and first estimate a model that relies only on FPI budgetary power scores. The results, shown in Table 4 (Models 3 and 9 for 1981 and 1995, respectively), are consistent with those Clucas's reports: the previously significant variables remain significant in 1981 (Table 4, Model 3), and the Professionalization variable is once again significant in 1995 (Table 4, Model 9).…”

“…In the models discussed above, we control only for budgetary power, yet in his analysis, Clucas (2007) aimed to control for gubernatorial power more generally. Indeed, there is nothing in his theoretical framework to suggest that it is budgetary power in particular that should affect the distribution of power in the legislature.…”