by Karl Kurtz
"What are the sources that legislators tap for information about public policy?" was an intriguing information request that I recently received. I found the answer(s) in the results of two surveys of state legislators. One is a national survey of all state legislators that NCSL, the Council of State Governments, the State Legislative Leaders Foundation and a team of academic political scientists conducted in 2002 as part of our study of the impacts of term limits. The other is a sample survey of legislators from 19 states published in a book by John A. Hird, Power, Knowledge and Politics: Policy Analysis in the States, 2005.
Unfortunately, these two studies did not ask about exactly the same information sources. In fact the top source on NCSL's survey-- the legislator's personal expertise--does not appear at all in Hird's study, and Hird's #1 source, constituents, was not asked about in our NCSL survey. The two surveys also used different scales: NCSL's question was based on a scale of 1 (not at all important) to 5 (very important), while Hird used a 1 (never important) to 7 (always important) scale.
But the really interesting thing is that the rank order of the responses by legislators to the sources that were common to both surveys was exactly the same. Legislative staff were first, followed in order by other members, leaders, lobbyists, executive agencies, national organizations, the governor, and the media. Click on the chart below to enlarge it.
As one of my colleagues said after seeing this chart, "It must be true if two surveys got the same results."
The results of the NCSL question about the sources of information that legislators rely on were not previously reported in our book, Institutional Change in American Politics: The Case of Term Limits.
Roses from The Thicket to Katherine Barrett, Richard Greene and Lynda Powell.
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