Partisan Competition and the Efficiency of Lawmaking in American State Legislatures, 1991-2009

• Published date: 01 September 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X14564388
• Date: 01 September 2015
• Author: William D. Hicks
• Subject Matter: Articles

American Politics Research

2015, Vol. 43(5) 743 –770

© The Author(s) 2015

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X14564388

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Article

Partisan Competition

and the Efficiency of

Lawmaking in American

State Legislatures, 1991-

2009

William D. Hicks1

Abstract

Does partisan competition explain why some legislatures are more efficient

at processing legislation than others? This article argues that legislative

parties’ strategic incentives and capabilities are a function of their size,

their ideological homogeneity, and the governor’s party. It shows that the

distribution of legislative seats between the parties influences legislative

efficiency, depending on the level of polarization between the parties and

the party of the governor. A small partisan seat margin reduces legislative

efficiency when the parties are polarized and when the government is divided.

It provides further evidence that polarization and divided government

can either positively or negatively affect legislative efficiency, depending

on the distribution of seats held between the two parties. This research

contributes to the literature by demonstrating the conditional influence

of political parties. Based in multilevel modeling techniques, this research

also contributes to the literature with robust evidence including 48 state

legislatures, through 19 years.

Keywords

legislative efficiency, divided government, polarization, partisan competition,

legislative productivity

1Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, USA

Corresponding Author:

William D. Hicks, Appalachian State University, 2059 Anne Belk Hall, Boone, NC 28608, USA.

Email: hickswd@appstate.edu

564388APRXXX10.1177/1532673X14564388American Politics ResearchHicks

research-article2015

744 American Politics Research 43(5)

Does partisan competition explain why some legislatures are more efficient

at processing the general volume of legislation than others? Partisan theories

of legislative organization and behavior suggest that strong minority parties

are capable of cultivating cross-party coalitions to craft procedural rules to

their advantage (Binder, 1997, 2006; Cox & McCubbins, 1997; Dion, 1997;

Fink, 2000). Legislative rules and institutions, furthermore, often enable the

minority party or another loose coalition constituting a minority to prevent

action by the majority party (Brady & Volden, 1998; Jones, 2001; Krehbiel,

1998). If these notions are true, conditions that enhance the minority party’s

incentive and capacity to obstruct policy items favored by the majority party

should reduce the number of bills a legislature enacts, controlling for, among

other things, the number of bills a legislature introduces. With a novel data-

set, this article tests this argument with recourse to the experience of the

American state legislatures from 1991 to 2009.

Consistent with partisan theories of legislative organization, this article

argues that parties facilitate or inhibit legislative efficiency conditionally.

Legislative parties’ strategic incentives and capabilities are a function of the

size of their legislative coalition, the ideological homogeneity of their coali-

tion, and the party of the governor. Among others, this article makes the fol-

lowing explicit assumptions. First, the minority party’s procedural

opportunities to obstruct the processing of legislation increase as its size in

relation to the majority party grows. Second, the minority party’s strategic

incentive to obstruct the processing of legislation increases as the parties

become more polarized. Third, governors, given their institutional powers

and prerogatives, provide legislative parties a powerful ally or opponent in

processing legislation. There is very little scholarship at the federal or state

level that prima facie undermines these assumptions.

These assumptions collectively imply the following expectations regard-

ing the sources of legislative efficiency. First, the distribution of seats between

the parties, what I refer to as the “partisan seat margin,” influences the effi-

ciency with which a legislature processes legislation conditional on the level

of polarization between the parties and whether the government is divided or

unified. A small partisan seat margin—that is, when the size of the majority

and minority parties is nearly equivalent—reduces legislative efficiency

when legislative parties are polarized and when the government is divided.

This article presents robust evidence in support of these expectations.

Second, if a legislature’s partisan seat margin influences its efficiency

conditional on polarization and divided government, then the effects of polar-

ization and divided government on legislative efficiency vary according to

the partisan seat margin. Toward this end, this article shows that polarization

reduces legislative efficiency when the partisan seat margin is small. This