Big Cities Still Disadvantaged in State Legislatures

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.

Why are big cities disadvantaged in legislatures?  Gamm and Kousser (a former NCSL summer intern, we're proud to say) explore four possible explanations, concluding as follows:

Surprisingly, we find little evidence that bills from a state’s largest metropolis lose more often when the big city delegation differs from the rest of the state along partisan lines. Instead, demographic differences matter, with cities that have many foreign-born residents, compared with the state as a whole, facing particularly high rates of discrimination. Our analysis also shows that the larger the metropolis grows, the more hostility it faces, both because outstate legislators are threatened by its sheer size and because a larger delegation is likely to have more internal divisions.

The paper is methodologically sophisticated, and portions of it will be dense for most practitioners.  But overall the writing is clear, and the most technical points are also explained in plain English.  To read the paper, go to the APSA annual meeting page and search on either author's name in the "Quick Search" box at the top of the page.

Comments

[John Tulloch]

FYI, The link to the paper search doesn't work. I got the paper through the APSA main page "Quick Search" feature.

Great post!

[Karl Kurtz]

Thanks for the comment, John, and for catching the link problem. I have changed the link to a more reliable one, but you will have to do some browsing on that page to get to the 2008 convention papers, where you can then search on the authors' names or the title of the paper.