The Thicket at State Legislatures

Legislative Pay Raises a Touchy Subject

By Morgan Cullen

Illinois House and Senate Leaders have sued Governor Pat Quinn, demanding that the state’s legislative salaries be immediately reinstated. Upset with the legislature’s inability to resolve the state’s pension crisis, Governor Quinn exercised his line item veto authority and eliminated the $13.8 million in the state budget reserved for legislator pay. While the current legal fight raises a number of constitutional questions in Illinois, it has also publicized the politically thorny issue of legislative pay in general.  

In most legislatures, it’s up to lawmakers to decide if they should raise their own salaries, making it almost impossible to do so. The issue is often too politically charged to touch.  Over the last five years, only 17 states have raised legislative pay and most of these were only modest increases. 

During the 2013 legislative session, only eight states raised pay for state legislators, mostly small incremental increases that barely kept pace with inflation. The Vermont legislature increased legislator salaries by $42.33.  North Dakota lawmakers saw their salaries increase by $5 per calendar day. And Oregon raised legislator pay by $324 annually. 

The only legislators that saw a significant increase in their salary came from states where the primary authority to increase pay doesn’t actually reside in the legislature.  In Idaho, the Citizen’s Commission on Legislative Compensation recommended an increase of $322 per year.  Delaware’s Commission, which previously reduced salaries by 2 percent for all state employees and elected officials to help balance the state’s budget, adjusted their salaries back up by $1,291 per year. 

In Pennsylvania, legislator salaries (one of the highest paid in the country) are actually tied to the consumer price index that adjusts automatically when the cost of living increases.  Lawmakers there saw their salaries increase over the past year from $82,026 to $83,801.  In Florida, legislator salaries are tied to the salary adjustments of state employees and they received a $10 increase. 

In Utah, lawmakers salaries actually doubled from $117/day to $273/day during legislative session. The justification for the salary increase was due to a change in how their per diem was allocated, moving from an unvouchered to a vouchered system. Legislators there will now have to submit receipts for the business expenses they incur during legislative session. By moving to a vouchered system, the salary increase is not expected to place an additional burden on the state budget. 

In two states legislator salaries were actually reduced this year. In Massachusetts, lawmakers salaries are tied to the state’s median household income which reduced salaries by $1,081. In California, the Citizens Compensation Commission voted to reduce salaries for all elected officials last December by 5 percent. California has the highest paid legislature in the country at $90,526 per year but they have also seen the largest salary reductions in recent years.  In 2009, the commission reduced salaries by 18 percent. Over the last five years, California legislators have seen their salaries cut by $25,682.

To help take the politics out of the issue, 19 states have created compensation commissions to provide independent and impartial recommendations. While a commission’s level of influence varies from state to state, they do provide a regular opportunity to review legislative salaries every couple of years to see if current salary levels should be raised or lowered. The type of legislative compensation methods in place in each state are illustrated on the map.

See NCSL’s 50 state table on legislature salary and per diem available here.

Student documentary 'Rubber and Glass Diplomacy' recounts the birth of Nebraska’s Unicameral legislature

By Katie Ziegler

Nebraska students Justin Myers and William Scheopner produced a lively 10-minute documentary about U. S. Senator George Norris’s efforts to create the nation’s only unicameral legislature.

Norris campaigned back and forth across the state to rally support for the 1934 ballot measure that abolished one chamber of the legislature and made the body nonpartisan. He felt that the two-house system was inefficient, expensive, and unresponsive to voters. Norris wrote, “there is no logical argument in favor of a two-house legislature. Through the conference committee, the politicians have the checks, and special interests have the balances.” Though he served in the Congress for 40 years, Norris’s goal in Nebraska was “to put the politicians out of business.”

from Capitol.org

It was an uphill battle. Only a small minority of the current state senators and representatives favored adopting the unicameral system, and just two of the state’s more than 400 newspapers editorialized in favor of the change. But Norris and his campaign partner, political science professor John Senning, emerged victorious at the polls.

Though Norris and Senning advised other states on their own pushes for unicameral legislatures, Nebraska remains unique among the 50 states today.

Kudos to Myers and Scheopner for their interest in state legislative history and for their excellent work on this documentary! 

Full- or Part-Time Legislature: Which is Better?

By Karl Kurtz

That's a question I get all the time when I speak to groups, both inside and outside of state capitols, about American legislatures. A recent magazine article featuring my categorization of legislatures as "professionalized," "hybrid" and "citizen" has generated several recent inquiries about which type of legislature is better.

I have an answer to this question, but first a few words about terminology. "Full-" and "part-time" are the common phrases that most people use to differentiate the operations of state legislatures. Political scientists have a fancier term, "professionalization," which measures not only the amount of time that legislators spend on the job but also the compensation of legislators and the number of staff working for the legislature. Professionalization is the concept that I have used to create the categories of legislatures.

The concept of legislative professionalization is designed to measure the capacity of legislatures and legislators to make policy decisions. Capacity, though, does not necessarily mean performance. A legislature with high capacity can perform poorly (Congress being an example), while legislatures with low capacity can perform at high levels.

It's also important to note that the policy-making capacity of a legislature (professionalization) is only one value among others that legislators and voters may set store by when they make decisions about the resources that they provide to their state legislature. One value that might conflict with increasing the capacity of legislatures might be public views about the appropriate scale and cost of state government. A second might be a desire to be governed by citizen legislators who spend most of their lives living and working in their local communities. Like the legendary Roman leader Cincinnatus, who left his farm to fight a war but returned to the plow when the war was over, citizen legislators go to the capitol to legislate for a few months but then return to their home towns.

All of this leads to my answer to the question: Neither one is necessarily better. I believe that the principal goal should be to have a legislature that is an independent and coequal branch of government, able effectively to represent the views of constituents, pass laws, and balance the power of the executive. Different legislatures with different levels of professionalization can accomplish these goals. Each state needs to choose the level of resources (compensation, time and staff) that allows them to meet these goals, within the context of their state's culture, size, complexity and values about government.

I will say, though, that the larger population states that are more socially complex and have necessarily large executive branches are more likely to need greater capacity in order for their legislature to be an independent and coequal branch of government. In other words, to represent its fairly homogenous population of half a million people effectively, Wyoming may not need California's full-time legislators, who are paid close to $100,000 a year and have a staff of more than 2,000 to help govern a state of 38 million people. But Wyoming's citizen legislature, which meets two months of the year, pays its members $12,000 and has a staff of about 40, would find it hard effectively to balance the power of the executive in a state as large and complex as California.

And indeed, that is the path that most states have taken in building the capacity of their legislatures. With only a very few exceptions the states that have the most professionalized legislatures have the largest populations, and the citizen legislatures are in the smallest population states. The hybrid legislatures are in-between, mostly in the medium population states.

Building on a table that appears in Peverill Squire and Gary Moncrief, State Legislatures Today: Politics Under the Domes, here is a summary of the implications of the two extreme levels of professionalization, incorporating some values other than policymaking capacity. The middle column of this table is adapted from Squire and Moncrief's book; the right column is my summary of qualities associated with citizen legislatures (click to enlarge).

Book Review: The Evolution of American Legislatures

by Karl Kurtz

...[T]he original state legislatures were the models for the Congress created by the Constitution. It is true that several of the most influenctial voices in the writing of the Constitution disparaged the existing state legislatures. Yet, in every elemental characteristic--number and name of houses and the relationship between them, the legislatures's ability to name its own leaders and adopt its own rules, and the power of the executive veto--the Congress under the Constitution closely resembled the original state legislatures. It bore no relationship at all to the Congress that existed under the Articles of Confederation, which was a unicameral chamber that fused legislative, executive and judicial powers, and granted each state, not each legislator, a vote....

This is a provocative paragraph from the introduction to University of Missouri Prof. Peverill Squire's new book, The Evolution of American Legislatures: Colonies, Territories, and States, 1619-2009.  Squire goes on from this teaser to summarize two evolutionary lines of legislatures in the United States--one that was highly successful and adaptive and the other that was not--in this schematic drawing.

Evolutionary Line 1 encapsulates Squire's compelling case that the 13 colonial legislatures, themselves highly original institutions, shaped and influenced the Constitutional Congress and that these two models together evolved into the territorial legislatures and their successors, the state legislatures. Each of the boxes in this chart receives detailed analysis in Squire's book.

Historians, political scientists and serious legislative junkies will love this book. Drawing on mountains of obscure primary and secondary sources and a comprehensive review of secondary sources (the bibliography is 70 pages in length), it covers not only our modern 51 American legislatures but an approximately equal number of colonial, confederal, territorial, and even the most arcane provisional legislatures. There is no other comparable scholarly work that looks at institutional change in American legislatures on such a grand scale. It is impressive in both its broad brush strokes and its convincing detail.

This is primarily a scholarly work, but Chapter 7, "The Professionalizing of Legislatures Since 1900," should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the institutional characteristics of our state legislatures today.

Model Code of Conduct Stands the Test of Time

by Karl Kurtz

Sixteen years ago, a group of legislative staff, part of NCSL's Legislative Staff Coordinating Committee (LSCC), published a Model Code of Conduct for Legislative Staff. The group spent two years working together to find common ground and ways to reconcile differing practices from state to state.

Peggy Kerns, director of NCSL's Ethics Center, says, "This is a really valuable document. We use it all the time in our ethics training. It has stood the test of time. It's genuinely a model of how to develop an ethics code."

Butch Speer, clerk of the Louisiana House of Representatives, says, "In 1993-94, I was honored to chair the task force charged with drafting the model code. I had the good fortune to have a team of dedicated and enthusiastic legislative staffers from across the country representing the different disciplines of legislative staff.  Cooperatively, we worked through many hours crafting a model code that speaks to the mission of legislative staff as well as to specific principles of conduct that express the highest ideals of our professions."

In January of 2012, LSCC adopted an amendment to the model code to incorporate new language about the importance of civility, inspired by a civility intiative undertaken by 2010-11 NCSL President Sen. Richard Moore, Massachusetts. The civility section reads:

Civil

A legislative staff member respects the rights of individuals to hold different opinions, and speaks truthfully without accusation or distortion, and avoids heightened rhetoric when serving the legislature. 

Comment: A legislative staff member who demonstrates civility chooses words carefully and understands that staff actions or communications reflect directly upon legislators, and ultimately, the legislative institution.  The actions of a legislative staff member reflect upon the legislature as an institution, and staff, by default,  represent the institution. Civility requires an acknowledgement of opposing views and the right of others to hold those views.  It does not suggest or require acceptance or agreement with those opinions.  A civil staff member understands that attempts to distort the opinions or reputations of others oftentimes result in a reciprocal effect upon the institution.   A civil legislative staff member is careful to remain civil in his or her own interactions, and thus serve as a positive example of maintaining and promoting  civility within the legislative institution.  

Polar Opposite States

by Karl Kurtz

In his column in the Sacramento Bee today, Dan Walters compares California and North Dakota. After contrasting the two states' very different populations, geography, topography, economy and politics, he concludes:

It's fair to assume that few Californians would abandon the state's scenery, weather, food and cultural amenities for North Dakota, despite the latter's vibrant economy. It's also fair to assume that few North Dakotans would opt for California's population density, cultural complexity, traffic congestion and struggling economy.

That said, Californians should admire North Dakotans for something they didn't do last week. More than two-thirds of the state's voters rejected a measure that would have abolished property taxes by tapping into a fat state surplus from the oil boom.

They heeded warnings from opponents, including business leaders, that passage would have unintended consequences, such as a loss of local control, and that their long-term interests would be best served by saving the windfall for future needs.

Now that's a real contrast to California's boom-and-bust mentality – tax cuts and lavish spending one year, followed by deficits and despair the next.

Have you got your own favorite polar opposite states? Because I'm interested in legislative institutional characteristics, I'm more likely to compare California and New Hampshire. Of course, because of its size, it's alway tempting to contrast California to almost any other state. What about some other pairings? Texas and Vermont, for example. Or among states of more similar size, Mississippi and Massachusetts.

Add a comment below or send me an e-mail with your favorite pair of contrasting states in reference to politicial, policy and institutional characteristics.

It’s the Message that Matters Most

Telling your state legislator how you feel about a bill might be more effective than filling out a form. 

by Meagan Dorsch

Growing up, my mother used to say, “Just tell me how you feel.” This usually allowed us to explain why we were frustrated, angry, concerned or excited. She might have been onto something.

A recent story in the Florida Current shows that lawmakers and staff respond more to personal stories about how a law will affect constituents, rather than form letters or blanket emails.

Kevin Cate, a governmental public relations and campaign adviser in Florida, surveyed 52 House and Senate aides at the Florida Legislature and asked what “influences their bosses the most.” Cate noted face-to-face visits were cited by more than 99 percent of the staffers, followed by personal letters and personalized emails. It is also interesting to note that phone calls and visits by interest groups both ranked higher in Cate’s study than “visits by lobbyists.”

Four out of five staffers indicated that a personal story about how a bill would affect constituents was the most effective, followed by stories regarding the effect of legislation on a legislator's district.

NCSL has found more than 575 state legislators on Twitter, and Cate noted the power of social and new media. About two-thirds of the legislative staff surveyed in Florida noted that “comments on social media sites” were important, and that lawmakers used Facebook to gauge the public’s opinion online. They also use these sites to gather information. More than half of Florida's legislative staff rated Facebook and Twitter as either "effective" or "very effective."

Cate makes an important note in his study: The message you send is more important than the medium. But does this apply only to Florida's Legislature? The poll below contains some of the top advocacy strategies from Cate's study. Let us know what works best in your state.

What is the best way to communicate with state legislators?

In person

Individual Letter

Comment on Social Media

Email

or View Results

Create your own poll at Flisti.com

Retiring Legislators have Interesting Comments on Legislative Life

by Karl Kurtz

Today's news brought three stories about six legislators who have recently announced that they are not planning to run for reelection. This is filing deadline season in a number of states, so it's not unusual to read about retiring legislators, especially in a redistricting year when voluntary turnover in legislatures is higher than normal. This group of stories, from legislatures at opposite ends of the institutional spectrum--Congress on one end and Utah and Idaho on the other--was of particular interest because of the commentary from the incumbents about their lives and their institutions.

Rep. David Dreier

First is a wrapup story in the New York Times about the recently announced departures of three veteran members of Congress (total combined experience of 102 years), Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, Rep. Norm Dicks of Washington (ranking Democrat on the House appropriations committee) and Rep. David Dreier of California (chair of the House rules committee). Some of Dreier's remarks were particularly insightful:

Despite objections by some to such longevity in office, Congress remains a place where experience matters, not just in the advancement seniority brings, but in knowing how to get things done and navigate a system built partially on personal relationships and tradition.

“All three of us were what I call institutional memory,” said Mr. Dreier.... “We need to get new blood in Congress and we’ve clearly got that. But we also need some institutional memory.”

The steady stream of retirements from Congress has given new weight to the idea that fierce partisanship and gridlock have made serving no longer the enjoyable experience it once was....

Mr. Dreier acknowledges that life on Capitol Hill has changed. But he disputes the notion that the atmosphere has never been worse....

“Rather than worse, I say it is different than it was,” said Mr. Dreier. “One of the reasons that it is different is that society is different than it was three decades ago. This institution is a reflection of society. We have a very divided society, more so than it has been. I don’t want to be the judge and say it is worse. There are a lot of things we have accomplished on a bipartisan basis.”

The departures from the legislature announced in Utah and Idaho were more about the problems of balancing personal and professional life with legislative service. Brian Cronin, a young, two-term Democrat from Boise, said this in his announcement that he would not seek a third term:

Millennials…Not Anymore!

by Meagan Dorsch

Nielsen, the company that tracks our television viewing habits, is now looking at ways we consume media on everything digital. According to the ratings company, Americans between the ages of 18-34 are redefining how media is consumed. So Nielsen is redefining what they are called.

Nielsen has now classified Millennials as "Generation C."

Nielsen says this age group (born between the launch of the VCR and the Internet), is taking online personal connections to a new level, with new devices and new experiences like no other generation. According to Nielsen's blog, the U.S. Census says Generation C is roughly 23 percent of the population, but represents:

• 27 percent of consumers who watch online video and visit social networking/blog sites
• 33 percent of Americans who own tablet devices
• 39 percent of the consumers using smart phones.

But don't discount the use of technology by older generations. The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has some great data on how older adults use the Internet and social media. According to Pew, the use of social networking sites among Internet users age 65 and older has grown 150 percent over the last two years. During this same period, Internet use by 50-64 year-olds doubled—from 25% to 51%. More than half of all 50 to 60 year olds use their cell phones to take pictures and 22 percent of 30 to 45 year olds use their phone for online banking.

NCSL has also identified over 500 state legislators on Twitter (look under our lists) who typically fall into older demographics.

But will this reclassification of Millennials catch on? A simple search on Twitter shows a mixed response. NCSL has developed a networking group for people in this newly classified generation. The mission of NCSL's Young Professionals group is to engage, educate, and support these state legislative leaders of tomorrow through professional development, networking opportunities and recognition.

Future state legislators and staff increasingly will come from this generation, and all will be considered digital natives. The way these generations will communicate with each other, and their constituents, will change the nature of the legislative process. Regardless of what they are called, younger generations will bring great technological and communication advances to the legislative institution.

New Organization Works to Make Civility a Top Priority in American Politics

NCSL Participates in Messaging Workshop.

By Jon Kuhl

Last Friday, I attended a workshop held by the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The workshop’s goal was to help develop the institute’s message as it begins a national effort to improve the level of civility in American politics.

The workshop was attended by about 40 representatives and leaders from a slew of bipartisan organizations and academic institutions, including the Council of State Governments, the National League of Cities and the League of Women Voters.

Everyone was in agreement that our nation—in state capitols and Washington—is in need of greater civility. Examples of politicians denigrating their political opponents and crossing the line from honest disagreement to character attacks are plentiful. With an ever-growing list of problems to be solved, the need for public officials to work together and demonstrate mutual respect could not be more urgent.