This fourth and final episode in a series celebrating and exploring the 50th anniversary of NCSL focuses on legislators. Lawmakers, experts on legislatures and NCSL CEO Tim Storey offer their perspective on the role of state legislator.
This episode is the fourth and final show in a series celebrating and exploring the 50th anniversary of NCSL.
On this episode, the focus is on legislators. Along with Senator Lee, two other lawmakers offer their perspective on the role of state legislator. Also joining the discussion are Tim Storey, the CEO of NCSL, two political scientists with deep knowledge of state legislatures and an NCSL researcher with results of the latest survey of legislators.
Earlier episodes charted the history of legislatures in the U.S., how the institution of the legislature evolved and the critical role of legislative staff.
Resources
Ed: Hello and welcome to “Our American States,” a podcast from the National Conference of State Legislatures. I’m your host Ed Smith.
JL: And the work gets done in the middle. We have an obligation to pay attention to everybody that comes in and we pick out the good stuff and try to put it together in a way that it is going to be acceptable not only to the committee, but to the senate or the house and then to both and then to the governor and then to the public.
Ed: That was Senator Judy Lee, a Republican from North Dakota and one of my guests on this special episode of “Our American States.” This episode is the fourth and final show in a series celebrating and exploring the 50th anniversary of NCSL.
On this episode, the focus is on legislators. There are 7,386 state lawmakers in the 50 states and another 192 serving in chambers in the U.S. Territories and the District of Columbia. The number of people who have ever served in a colonial territorial or state legislature is impossible to arrive at with any precision. But I pressed political scientist Peg Squire, my invaluable guide for this series, and he estimates based on total numbers that are known for a few states that 200,000 to 250,000 have served since the first meeting of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1619.
On this podcast, I wanted to better understand who the people are who have served as legislators over the centuries and how those in office now look at the institution and the perspective of others who had spent their careers studying legislatures. I contacted Senator Lee to get the perspective of someone who has both long tenure in the legislature and a bit of life experience. And with more than 30 years under her belt as a lawmaker, she fit the bill. Lee sees partisanship as very working effectively and social media as an amplifier. “People are more likely to believe something that they saw on some post than they are likely to believe the people who are who they have helped to elect.”
She thinks legislators need to focus on the substance and complex issues of concern to their constituents and solving those problems she says means listening to everyone. “And once again, Ed, you got to listen to the details to find out that you got to work with everybody else or most everybody else to get to a good final result. And it’s never perfect. That’s why you come back and do it again next time.”
Legislators in our colonial assemblies, territorial legislatures and modern state legislatures have been grabbling with those details for centuries. The people who made up legislative bodies changed over the years though they were all men until the late 19th century. Squire, a professor at the University of Missouri and one of the foremost academic experts on state legislatures points out that while the members of early colonial legislatures tended to be from the wealthy class, a different sort of lawmaker emerged in new legislatures in the growing country. “With the transition to the national era in the earliest day legislature you start seeing more so-called backwoodsman people from the frontier getting elected. Daniel Boone for example serving in Virginia. When you get to the territorial era and that’s truly in most cases frontier living, the big change was that instead of having more established middle aged and older legislators, you had a lot of very young men serving in the territorial legislatures so that they would be generally in their 20’s or 30’s.”
Farmers were always well represented in legislatures and increasingly were joined by professionals think lawyers and bankers who had both the flexibility in their jobs and the means to serve in what were usually low paid positions. Turnover in legislatures was very high in the first half of the 19th century and even later Squire says and then things slowly began to change. “Starting early in the 20th century, there was a movement to pay legislators a little better of their concerns about reforming them to make them perform better. So, their reputations were never stellar, but they did improve a little bit and in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s as the sort of early movement towards professionalizing the legislature took hold.”
That change continued into the modern era, but even now Squire points out legislatures do not necessarily reflect the makeup of the country. In large measure, because a limited number of people have the flexibility in their jobs to serve. He notes that legislatures are “much more diverse than they were a generation ago. White middle-aged males tend to still be dominant and again that’s in large part because you have a lot of legislatures that don’t pay well. And so, it is hard for people in the middle of their working careers to take time away to serve in the legislature. It has changed and you can see the change when you look over how things are different today from say in the 1950s and 1960s. The legislative population today still isn’t sort of representative of large of the overall population.”
In the 1960s, there was a series of Supreme Court decisions that established what is referred to as one person one vote. One of the biggest changes for state legislatures came in 1964 with the ruling in Reynolds v. Simms, which mandated state legislative districts be of about equal size in population, a ruling that meant far fewer legislators from rural districts.
Karl Kurtz was a senior manager at NCSL who worked for one of the organizations that combined to form NCSL in 1975. Kurtz, who holds a Ph.D. in political science, also continued to do research. He served legislators in a number of issues over the years and was able to track changes in their makeup. Once the fallout of the Reynolds v Simms decision worked its way through legislatures Kurtz says, it was a sharp decline in the number of farmers serving in legislatures. Another change was a little bit surprising. “When we tend to think about this as rural versus urban, but the first thing that really happened was a huge growth in the number of suburban legislators; not so much urban. It was the suburban districts that were under substantially underrepresented.”
Younger legislators also came in during that period, Kurtz said. “Younger also meant more open to change and that’s what created a fertile ground for the kind of legislative strengthening movement that took root in the late 1960s and early 70s.”
That legislative strengthening movement grew out of the reform efforts spearheaded by California House Speaker Jesse Unruh that were ultimately aimed at ensuring legislatures were a co-equal branch of government. Many legislatures increased their staff and switched to annual sessions. Kurtz believes those were formed to accomplish a lot, but the legislatures faced new hurdles. “In many ways, the reforms of the 60s and 70s were the easy things to do. It wasn’t hard to add more staff. It wasn’t hard to add better pay. It wasn’t hard just you know cost some money. It wasn’t hard to expand the amount of time available to the legislature and the work commitment of the legislators and it helped that it was a period of relative support for public institutions. There was a good deal of public confidence and belief in what government did. You know I think the capacity building was successful and it did enable legislatures to make to do things better.”
TM: 8:27
Ed: But now Kurtz says along with others inside and outside legislatures partisanship and polarization are increasingly serious challenges to the deliberate process at the core of legislating. “One of the things that we worry about in today’s legislatures is a decline in deliberation, the ability to talk through issues, give a hearing to all sides. People are too dug in.”
Another thing that has changed in legislatures is its diversity of those who serve. While legislatures were all male and largely all white for most of their existence, they have changed a lot especially in the last 50 years. In 1975, for example, there were 609 women serving in state legislatures. About 8% of the total. Now there are 2,451 female lawmakers or about 32%. There are also about an equal percentage of women serving in some sort of leadership position. There also have been significant increases in the number of black, Latino, Asian and native American legislators along with those elected from the LGBTQ+ community. But one thing that has not changed is a steady trend over the last several decades where legislators report they are working longer hours in their legislative role. Kurtz in surveys 10 years apart found legislators reporting more time on their elected jobs. In a new survey from NCSL, found legislators on average reporting that their legislative job took 74% of the time of a full-time job.
Emily Ronco at NCSL, who worked on the survey, said it’s not too surprising that lawmakers need to put in longer hours. “Access to legislators is different now, too, than it was 20 years ago. We’ve got remote participation for committees or for sessions. You know there are so many ways that constituents can get in touch with their members now whether its social media or email or showing up in person or phone calls. All the traditional ones in addition to now a whole slew of digital access to members that the complexity of what members are trying to navigate is shifting and so we are seeing an increase in interim work studies or commissions to look into things in greater detail.”
For all the changes in legislatures and legislators in the last several decades including the election of more women and more people of color, Ronco says the profile of legislators in the most recent surveys is not too surprising. “The average state legislator based on the data we collected is male, a member of the baby boomer generation and white. And when we compared the survey results with U.S. Census Bureau data, we also learned that the average legislator has higher post-secondary degree attainment and is more affluent than the average American household.”
No matter how the demographics or backgrounds of lawmakers have changed, being an effective legislator comes down to some basics in the view of Tim Storey, CEO of NCSL who has been paying keen attention to legislatures for the past 30 years. “I think the traits that make someone an effective legislator today probably not a whole lot different than they have been since legislatures were found over 400 years ago on this continent and over 1200 years ago in Western civilization. It would be a person of integrity, but not uncompromising you know willing to hear other sides of issues, choose the hills you are going to die on; not make perfect the enemy of the good.”
Storey also notes, as have others, that state legislators increasingly over the last few decades have grappled with some of the most challenging domestic public policy issues in the nation, often when Washington has failed. He says it probably should not surprise us. “I think both in terms of the population and the way the world economy has changed, we underestimate how impossible it is to come up with policies that really can apply to the entire country when we have so much diversity and difference within the country both within states and across state lines. I don’t know that we should see this as like Washington is broken. Maybe this is the natural evolution of things.”
TM: 13:04
Senate President pro-term Wayne Harper, a Republican of Utah and the current president of NCSL, thinks working together will be critical for legislators over the coming decades. “So, we as legislators need to go over and say OK, we don’t know what’s coming down the road in 20 years or 50 years, but let’s make sure that we’ve got the right laws and the right things in place so our children and grandchildren, our friends and neighbors can enjoy the same quality of life and the opportunity that every rest of the United States should enjoy. So, I think we should be keeping doors open and more importantly talking together on how we want to make that happen and work together to enable it.”
One legislator who likely will be around to see how things work out decades from now is Representative Cailen Hayward, a democrat of Wisconsin. Hayward is 26 and the assistant minority leader in the Wisconsin house. He has been a legislator since 2019. Hayward points out that people of his generation have different priorities than older legislators. “A lot of time we have some older legislators who are maybe baby boomers. They bought their homes. Their homes are paid off. They’ve been around for a while. They’ve paid off their student loans. They have healthcare, etc. For young people, that is not always a reality.”
Like his colleagues across the aisle, Hayward thinks moving past partisanship and polarization is critical for legislatures. And if he is right about his generation, they may be the force to get past it.
“I think young people are not interested in talking about partisan pockets anymore. We want to get to the core of the issues.”
So, legislators are working longer hours in their legislative roles. They are grabbling with increasingly complex policies. Their efforts are often dogged bipartisanship and their ranks are slowly giving way to a younger and more diverse group. Where does that leave them in their institutions? In Tim Storey’s estimation, a pretty good place.
“Legislators are undoubtedly more effective and an efficient institution today than they were when NCSL was formed in 1975. In terms of impact on making people’s lives better, improving policy in the states, there is almost no doubt that the legislatures of today are far more equipped, far more active and have a much more dramatic impact on the policies that shave the lives of people that live in the different states.”
I’ve been talking with Senator Wayne Harper, Representative Cailin Hayward, Senator Judy Lee, Carl Kurtz, Emily Ronco, Peg Squire and Tim Storey about NCSL’s 50th anniversary and the vital role of legislators over the centuries in the nation’s governments. Thanks for listening.
You can check out all the podcasts from the National Conference of State Legislatures by searching for NCSL podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast “Our American States” dives into some of the most challenging public policy issues facing legislators. On “Across the Aisle” host Kelley Griffin tells stories of bipartisanship. Also check out our special series “Building Democracy” on the history of legislatures.