Custodians of American democracy: the strength of the legislature often lies behind the scenes with the sometimes unnoticed but hard-working staff.

• Author: Kurtz, Karl T.
• Position: STRONG STAFF, STRONG INSTITUTIONS

When he taught at NCSL's Legislative Staff Management Institute, University of Minnesota professor John Bryson often would say, "State legislative staff are the custodians of a central institution of American democracy." By custodian he meant "guardian" or "curator."

But there is another way in which the more mundane meaning of custodian as "janitor" could apply to legislative staff: Their work is seldom noticed unless they mess up or fail to do something. As one anonymous staffer puts it, legislative staff "are the hidden engine that make the legislature work."

Perhaps because of this invisibility, the work of legislative staff receives very little attention from scholars of the legislative process or the news media. There are only two book-length studies of staff, one of which is more than 30 years old. Those books focus on the role of nonpartisan staff. Virtually nothing has been written about partisan staff and their work.

We set out to address this oversight by conducting a national survey of legislative staff to find out who they are, what they do and how they perceive the legislative process. In the survey we were particularly interested in determining if there are differences between the work and attitudes of nonpartisan and partisan staff.

WHO ARE THEY?

For the most part, legislative staff are a mature lot--45 percent of all respondents are aged 50 to 64 and one-third are 35 to 49. When we split out partisan from nonpartisan staff we find that partisan staff are substantially younger. A third of the partisan staff is in the 20 to 34 age group compared to only 12 percent of the nonpartisan staff. But not all of the partisan staff are Gen X or Y: The remaining two-thirds are split equally among the two older age groups.

As would be expected from the age statistics, partisan staff have substantially less tenure in the legislature than do nonpartisan staff. Almost exactly half of them have worked for the legislature for less than 10 years. On the other hand, nearly two-thirds of the nonpartisan staff have been in legislative service for 10 years or more.

Legislative staff are generally a well-educated group. Ninety-three percent of nonpartisan and 89 percent of partisan have college or postgraduate degrees. But more than two-thirds of the nonpartisan staff have postgraduate degrees compared to one-third of partisan staff. This reflects the fact that many of the fields dominated by nonpartisan staff such as bill drafting, program evaluation and policy analysis usually require advanced degrees.

Among those who have postgraduate degrees, 37 percent have law degrees (one respondent calls the legislative staff "the best law firm in my state"), 34 percent have advanced degrees in the social sciences and 14 percent in economics or business.

WHAT DO THEY DO?

A question about how staff spend their time in 11 different categories shows that most staff spend a little bit of time on lots of different things. Eighty-five percent say they spend at least some portion of their time doing research and reference work, and 70 percent devote time to constituent service and...