IngentaConnect Disentangling the Relationship between Legislative Professionalis...

Author: Malhotra, Neil

Source: Legislative Studies Quarterly, Volume 33, Number 3, August 2008 , pp. 387-414(28)

Publisher: Comparative Legislative Research Center, The University of Iowa

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The Center's principal activity is publishing the Legislative Studies Quarterly, an international refereed journal devoted to research on representative assemblies. The Quarterly is the official journal of the Legislative Studies Section of the American Political Science Association. It was founded in 1976 by faculty members at The University of Iowa but today its editors and the members of its editorial board are drawn from major research universities throughout the United States and abroad.
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Abstract:

Recent movements to deprofessionalize American state legislatures have been driven partly by the notion that professional legislators spend more than their citizen counterparts. This article explores the relationship between legislative professionalism and government spending, a connection complicated by the possibility that legislators in high-spending states may choose professional institutions to handle their responsibilities more effectively. I employed propensity score matching, an increasingly used technique of causal inference, to disentangle the relationship. Contrary to previous academic work and popular notions, I found that professional legislatures do not spend significantly more than part-time bodies do, if one accounts for the fact that legislatures in high-spending states have a greater need to be professionalized and therefore select those structural frameworks. These findings have important implications for the study of the effects of legislative institutions on public policies more generally and attest to the utility of recently developed techniques of causal inference to disentangle these relationships.

Disentangling the Relationship between Legislative Professionalism and Government Spending