by Karl Kurtz
Illinois legislatve staffer Tim Rice and I jointly authored an article for the July/August issue of State Legislatures magazine, "Facing the Future: Retiring colleagues, stagnant salaries and intensifying partisanship are top concerns of legislative staffers." Our editors' cutting room floor is littered with some charts and tables that didn't make it into the magazine. Here, for those analysts who prefer data to abstract illustrations, are the missing items from the article. The first one shows the responses from the 1,260 legislative staff who responded to a survey question, How many years from now do you anticipate leaving legislative staff service?
I'm still trying to figure out those four 65+ year-olds who say they plan to work for 15 or more years. Are they that dedicated (addicted) that they plan to work until 80+? Were they messing with the survey? Or are they so old that they couldn't understand the question?
The second pair of charts gives the average scores, on a scale of of 1-Not at all Likely to 7-Very Likely, to the question, How important do you think each of the following potential challenges is to the effective performance of legislative staff in your legislature? Respondents were asked to score 12 potential challenges.
Top Six Challenges
Bottom Six Challenges
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