What happened to the "citizen" in the "citizen legislature?

• Position: On First Reading

The conventional wisdom is that there are nine or 10 (depending on who is doing the counting) full-time legislatures and about 15 classic "citizen" legislatures in which most people hold other jobs when they're not attending to business at the capitol.

A survey jointly conducted by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), the Council of State Governments and the State Legislative Leaders Foundation last year set out to determine just how much time it takes to be a legislator. The survey asked all state legislators how much time they spend doing the job--taking into account session time, interim work, constituent service and campaigns--and, compared to a full-time job, what percentage that was.

You might think that legislators in the 10 most populous states spend the most time on the job, but you'd be wrong. Law-makers in Florida, New Jersey and Texas don't. They spend only about 70 percent of their time on the job.

Also surprising in the rankings is a group of medium-sized states that slipped into the top 10 or were not far behind. Arizona lawmakers reported about 80 percent time on the job. Colorado, Oklahoma, Missouri and North Carolina...