by Karl Kurtz
Did you ever go up to Albany from this city [New York] with a delegation that wanted anything from the Legislature? No? Well, don't. The hayseeds who run all the committees will look at you as if you were a child that didn't know what it wanted, and will tell you in so many words to go home and be good and the Legislature will give you whatever it thinks is good for you.
So spoke the legendary Tammany Hall leader and New York state Senator George Washington Plunkitt in 1905. In an age of malapportionment that favored rural areas over urban ones, his statement is not surprising, regardless of the state--you could have said the same about Birmingham, Alabama, Burlington, Vermont or Chicago, Illinois. But most casual observers and many scholars of state legislatures believe that this problem of big cities being disadvantaged in state legislatures went away after the one-person, one-vote decisions of the 1960s.
Not so, say political scientists Gerald Gamm and Thad Kousser in a fascinating paper, "The Embattled Metropolis: Big Cities in American State Legislatures," presented at the recent meeting of the American Political Science Association. To study this question they have developed a remarkable database that catalogs 165,000 bills in 13 states, 1880-1997. They identified 50,000 (30%) of these bills as ones that dealt primarily with local government. Comparing the success rates of bills dealing with the largest city in each state to those of smaller cities, they found that in every period, before and after the one-person, one-vote decisions, far fewer big city bills pass than smaller city bills.
Lower house passage rates, over time
Notes: The data for this table are drawn directly from the legislative journals of Alabama, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington.