This article examines the relationship between term limits in parliament and “electoral disconnection,” the notion that legislators constrained in their ability to run for office face diminished incentives to perform strategic activities to boost their chances of securing candidacy and re-election. We leverage the case of the Italian Five Star Movement’s party-imposed limit of two terms for affiliates seeking to gain or retain a parliamentary seat. We exploit an original dataset of parliamentary activities covering both chambers of the Italian Parliament between 2013 and 2022. We estimate a series of mixed-effect regression models to assess the performance of MPs who were elected in 2013 and re-elected in 2018. In line with our expectations, the evidence suggests that term-limited representatives serving their second mandate tend to become less productive when it comes to “electorally lucrative” activities and more prone to rebelling than their non-term-limited colleagues. These findings contribute to our understanding of the incentives that drive parliamentary behavior.

Do policy priorities that candidates emphasize during election campaigns predict their subsequent legislative activities? We study this question by assembling novel data on legislative leadership posts held by Japanese politicians and using a fine-tuned transformer-based machine learning model to classify policy areas in over 46,900 statements from 1270 candidate manifestos across five elections. We find that a higher emphasis on a policy issue increases the probability of securing a legislative post in the same area. This relationship remains consistent across multiple elections and persists even when accounting for candidates' previous legislative leadership roles. We also discover greater congruence in distributive policy areas. Our findings indicate that campaigns provide meaningful signals of policy priorities.

What is the effect of divided government on issue attention in state legislatures? Much of the research on divided government examines how it affects the enactment of significant legislation but does not consider other effects on legislative behavior. In this article, I propose a new theory of the relationship between divided government and legislative activity. Regardless of partisan control, reelection-minded legislators face pressure to deliver benefits to voters, yet divided government can make substantive policy change difficult. As a result of these competing pressures, under divided government legislators increasingly turn their focus to bills that benefit their local constituents, which are seen as easier to enact and allow them to engage in advertising, credit claiming, and position taking. Consistent with this theory, I find that under divided government, legislators introduce bills at the same rate, but the type of legislation introduced shifts away from statewide policy changes and towards district-specific legislation.

This article examines the relationship between legislative civility and legislative productivity in US state legislatures. The research employs data from the National Survey of State Legislative Lobbyists and from the State Policy Innovation and Diffusion (SPID) database. The former dataset is used to generate an overall civility index for each state as developed by Kettler et al. The SPID database allows one to measure the legislative productivity of a state legislature. Employing these data, negative binomial and Poisson regression models reveal that state legislatures rated as more civil by their own lobbyists produced significantly more pieces of noteworthy legislation than those legislative bodies rated as less civil. These results suggest that the quality of internal legislative dynamics matters for legislative productivity.

The Squire Index measuring the professionalization levels of American state legislatures was created three decades ago. In this note, I explain how the 2021 update was compiled. I then document the index’s stability over the years for which it has been measured, present alternative measures to explore a problematic aspect of the index, and finally examine how each of the index’s three components has moved relative to Congress between 1979 and 2021.

Theories that explain the power of legislative leaders have been developed for the U.S. Congress and lower chambers of state legislatures, but they have not been tested for state senates, even though senate leaders can be quite influential. Following Mooney (2013a), I develop a new numerical index score measuring the formal power of the top chamber-elected leader of each state senate from 1995 through 2010. I then use the data to test various hypotheses explaining variation in the power of legislative leaders. The results uncover partial evidence for conditional party government theory, but only for senates that elect their own president. When the lieutenant governor serves as senate president, senators do not perceive their top chamber-elected leader as an officer able to best carry out their ideological, electoral, or policy objectives. This underscores crucial differences between senate chambers that elect their own presidents and those that do not.

There is optimism that the growing number of women in political office will reorient the focus of international politics toward more social and humanitarian issues. One basis for this optimism is the argument that women legislators hold distinct foreign policy preferences and act on them to affect changes in policy. However, we know little about gender differences in the behavior of individual legislators on these issues. This study investigates the behavior of individual legislators of the United States, one of the most important actors in international politics, in the context of development aid. Analyzing a diverse set of legislative behaviors in the U.S. Congress, we find no evidence that women legislators behave any differently than men with regard to these issues. Beyond its contribution to our understanding of the making and future of American foreign policy, this study contributes to broader debates about women’s representation and foreign policy.

Most trade agreements are ratified with overwhelming support by legislators throughout the world. This lack of opposition is surprising given the strong distributional consequences of trade and the expectation of conventional political economy theory that parliamentary votes on trade policy should be closely contested between winners and losers of globalization. To analyze the driving forces behind legislators’ voting behavior while avoiding the obscuring effect of party discipline, I analyze under which circumstances legislators decide to rebel against their party’s position when voting on the ratification of trade agreements. I put forward two hypotheses: First, rebellions are more likely when the trade agreement is with a larger trading partner and when the liberalization through the agreement is more comprehensive. Second, legislators will rebel when their party’s position does not align with their constituency’s economic interests. These hypotheses are supported by a series of multinomial regression analyses based on an original dataset comprising votes of several thousand legislators from multiple countries on the ratification of trade agreements.

While many scholars and analysts have observed a decline in civility in recent years, there have been few examinations of how political, economic, and institutional structures may partially explain inter-state differences in these trends. We suggest three potential explanations: (1) institutional structures, such as legislative professionalism and gubernatorial power, have created different contexts in which legislators build and maintain inter-personal relationships; (2) partisan competition has led to less bipartisan cooperation and contributed to strained relationships between members of different parties; and, (3) economic inequity and change has contributed to economic anxiety among citizens, contributing to conflict in legislative bodies as elected officials attempt to navigate emerging policy challenges. To test these explanations, we develop an innovative measure of civility using a national survey of lobbyists and a partial Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP) design. Findings suggest that there is some validity to all three explanations, and signifying that civility is at least partially a result of structural issues.

According to conventional wisdom, closed-list proportional representation (CLPR) electoral systems create incentives for legislators to favor the party line over their voters’ positions. However, electoral incentives may induce party leaders to tolerate “shirking” by some legislators, even under CLPR. This study argues that in considering whose deviations from the party line should be tolerated, party leaders exploit differences in voters’ relative electoral influence resulting from malapportionment. We expect defections in roll call votes to be more likely among legislators elected from overrepresented districts than among those from other districts. We empirically test this claim using data on Argentine legislators’ voting records and a unique dataset of estimates of voters’ and legislators’ placements in a common ideological space. Our findings suggest that even under electoral rules known for promoting unified parties, we should expect strategic defections to please voters, which can be advantageous for the party’s electoral fortunes.

Scholars have argued that female legislators are more prone to collaborate than their male counterparts. Though collaboration may be more or less evident in particular situations, we seek to more clearly establish the mechanism behind women’s collaborative activity using the framework of marginalization. In this paper, we use cosponsorship data from 74 state legislative chambers from 2011–2014 to analyze collaborative patterns and mobilizing institutions. We find female legislators are more collaborative than men, and that their collaborative advantage strengthens in chambers where women are systematically excluded from leadership positions. The advantage also extends to bipartisan collaboration, but only in less polarized settings with women’s caucuses. Furthermore, our findings imply that as women are integrated into leadership collaboration will actually decline, especially within their own party. We believe these results are important for understanding both the roots of collaborative behavior among female legislators and consequences of chambers that marginalize women from leadership positions.

Recently, scholars of the lawmaking process have urged their colleagues to devote more attention to the potential impact of bill content on legislative outcomes. Heeding their call, this paper builds an original dataset of over 5,000 pieces of state-level legislation addressing issues that span the ideological spectrum. It compares proposals that challenge the authority of the national government in a specific domain to proposals that lack federalism-related implications and finds that the former, all else being equal, make less legislative progress toward enactment. In addition, it categorizes the measures that resist national laws based on the specific nature of the challenge they pose. Its analysis finds that measures that are inconsistent with existing national law but work within the law’s legal framework make more legislative progress than measures that seek to nullify the national law or that vow not to cooperate with it. It also confirms that sponsor characteristics such as majority status, the number of cosponsors, institutional rules such as hearing requirements, and state-level factors like party control of the state legislature affect how much progress proposals make toward enactment. Thus, the paper demonstrates the importance of legislative content as an explanatory factor and sheds light on the nature of intergovernmental relations in the contemporary United States.

Collective action, particularly by low-resource groups, presents an opportunity for re-election-minded legislators to learn about (and subsequently represent) their constituents’ salient interests. In fact, legislators are more likely to support the preferences of protesters than non-protesters. Legislators are also more likely to support the preferences of racial and ethnic minority, low-income and grassroots protesting groups than they are to represent better-resourced protesters. This argument emerges from a formal theory and is empirically tested using legislative roll-call vote data from the 102nd through the 104th US Congresses and data on civil rights, minority issues and civil liberties issue area protests reported in the New York Times. This counterintuitive result enhances understanding of inequalities in representation. It demonstrates that under certain conditions, political representation favors disadvantaged populations.

Legislators who know their constituents' opinions are more likely to be successful in providing substantive representation on issues of the day. However, previous work suggests that state legislators and candidates commonly misestimate their constituents' preferences. Some of that work also finds that candidates and current incumbents in highly professionalized legislatures are less likely to misestimate constituent opinion. We investigate why this professionalism advantage exists. We use a Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition to determine how much of the professionalism advantage can be attributed to three sources: attracting knowledgeable candidates, fostering legislator knowledge in office, and retaining incumbents. We apply the decomposition to data on candidates' perceptions of public opinion from the 2014 National Candidate Survey. Fostering knowledge in office and retaining incumbents are not responsible for the professionalism advantage. We find evidence that the professionalism advantage occurs because higher professionalism legislatures attract more knowledgeable nonincumbent candidates.

I argue that the value of a particular set of committee assignments for a legislator is dependent on that legislator's policy interests. By this, I mean that “good” assignments will match committee policy jurisdictions with member policy priorities. I develop this concept of committee-agenda matching and present a measure of this match for legislators in 12 state lower chambers. After some brief measure validation, I present a substantive application, demonstrating that this match poses serious consequences for individual legislator's ability to shepherd their bills through the legislative process.

Recent work on legislative politics has documented complex patterns of interaction and collaboration through the lens of network analysis. In a largely separate vein of research, the field experiment—with many applications in state legislatures—has emerged as an important approach in establishing causal identification in the study of legislative politics. The stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA)—the assumption that a unit's outcome is unaffected by other units' treatment statuses— is required in conventional approaches to causal inference with experiments. When SUTVA is violated via networked social interaction, treatment effects spread to control units through the network structure. We review recently developed methods that can be used to account for interference in the analysis of data from field experiments on state legislatures. The methods we review require the researcher to specify a spillover model, according to which legislators influence each other, and specify the network through which spillover occurs. We discuss these and other specification steps in detail. We find mixed evidence for spillover effects in data from two previously published field experiments. Our replication analyses illustrate how researchers can use recently developed methods to test for interference effects, and support the case for considering interference effects in experiments on state legislatures.