Some state legislation makes for game-changing, visionary public policy—developing highway systems, organizing state parks, establishing statewide systems of public assistance. Some is more modest in scope—say, building a trailside museum in the Jamaica Plain district of Boston, or temporarily protecting the raccoons and mink of Red River County, Texas.
What is it that leads lawmakers sometimes to craft policies with a broad impact and sometimes to focus on narrow, district legislation tailored to the interests of a specific village, city, or county? According to a new study, the first answer is fierce party politics. It may be hard to believe as one watches Republicans and Democrats rip one another to shreds and log-jam budgets, but political scientist Gerald Gamm of the University of Rochester finds that “in the absence of competitive party politics, you don’t see broad-based policymaking at the state level.”
“Party competition puts together coalitions of legislators who are all on the same team, and gives those legislators an incentive to show how they’re different from the other party,” explains study coauthor Thad Kousser, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego. “It enables parties to become meaningful policybased organizations that compete over different visions for the state as a whole.”
Counterintuitive though it seems at the moment, the idea that one-party politics “descends into regionalism and factionalism” has been in play since 1949, says Kousser. It is their second finding that really upsets the applecart. “One of the big arguments that’s been made over the last 30 or 40 years is that if you pay legislators more and give them bigger staffs, they’ll legislate more for the common good, be more professional, and be less focused on day-to-day district concerns,” says Gamm. “And what we’re showing is that’s not necessarily true. We’re finding that the better paid people are the ones who are most obsessed with district concerns, presumably because they’re most focused on getting reelected.”
Uncovering these influences took the researchers more than a decade. Gamm led teams of research assistants in poring over old and new legislative journals to code more than 165,000 bills, which cover 120 years in 13 different states. “It’s extraordinary. There’s no data set like this,” Kousser says. There wasn’t even a record of when some of these legislatures met for most of their histories. “We basically had to create that record from scratch,” says Gamm. They also developed biographies of each of the people in each of the legislatures.
Because of the project’s scope, “these are the most general findings I think we’ve been able to generate as political scientists,” says Gamm. “They hold over lots of periods of time and in various kinds of states, so we assume they would apply to the House of Representatives and the Senate. But there are 101 chambers in the United States, and part of what we’re doing is calling attention to the extent to which important decisions about people’s lives are made in the remaining 99.”
Gerald Gamm and Thad Kousser, “Broad Bills or Particularistic Policy? Historical Patterns in American State Legislatures,” American Political Science Review, February 2010.
Read more stories by Jessica Ruvinsky.