Political scientist and author Pev Squire joined the podcast to discuss his latest book, a deep dive into about 1,500 ballot measures related to the operations of the legislature that were put to voters over more than 300 years. Squire shared some of the insights he gleaned from his research.
On this episode, we’re joined by Pev Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri and an expert on state legislatures.
He's the author of several books on legislatures and government, and he joined the podcast to discuss his latest book, “Reforming Legislatures: American Voters and State Ballot Measures 1792- 2020.” The deep dive into about 1,500 ballot measures related to the operations of the legislature that were put to voters over more than 300 years provided Squire with a number of insights.
We discussed how voters view ethics, the qualities they want to see in their lawmakers and the healthy skepticism voters have about legislatures. Squire also explained what he learned about the notion that voters love their own lawmaker but hate the legislature.
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Ed Smith: (00:12):
Hello and welcome to “Our American States,” a podcast from the National Conference of State Legislatures. I'm your host, Ed Smith.
Pev Squire: (00:21):
This goes back to 1792 and it's an interesting window into how Americans sort of view their legislatures and how they would like to change them.
ES: (00:30):
That was Pev Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri and an expert on state legislatures. He's the author of several books on legislatures and government, and he joined the podcast to discuss his latest book, “Reforming Legislatures: American Voters and State Ballot Measures 1792- 2020. The deep dive into about 1,500 ballot measures related to the operations of the legislature that were put to voters over more than 300 years provided Squire with a number of insights.
We discussed how voters view ethics, the qualities they want to see in their lawmakers and the healthy skepticism voters have about legislatures. Squire also explained what he learned about the notion that voters love their own lawmaker but hate the legislature. Here's our discussion.
Pev, welcome back to the podcast.
PS: Thank you. Delighted to be here.
ES: So, we’re here at NCSL'S Summit in Boston, discussing your book, “Reforming Legislatures: American Voters and State Ballot Measures 1792 to 2020.” You looked at about 1,500 measures that had to do with the organization and rules that govern legislatures and legislators. It's a tremendous task, having read the book, and I just wonder why you took that on.
PS (01:54):
Well, it's one of those things that I sort of stumbled into. I was working on another project, which will now come out as a book sometime next year, and I sort of decided to see what was going on with all these ballot measures that had been put to the voters and got intrigued with that and decided to see how I could gather data on it and went down that rabbit hole and found out that this goes back to 1792 and it's an interesting window into how Americans sort of view their legislatures and how they would like to change them.
ED: (02:31):
So voters over the long period of time that you document were skeptical of their lawmakers and they were concerned that they pay attention to the needs of their constituents and not to lobbyists and campaign donors, that kind of thing. Can you talk about what emerges from the data in that respect, the degree to which you can sort of discern that from what you researched?
PS: (02:55):
We have this notion that it is sort of focused on Congress where the idea is that people love their lawmakers and hate the legislature, and that's not really true. When you look at how they voted on ballot measures, they're very skeptical of the motives of their lawmakers. They're happy to put ethical regulations and rules in place to govern their behavior in office, and they're reluctant to pay them a lot under most circumstances. At the same time, they tend to be fairly generous towards the institution. They would like to see them work better than they appear to work when lawmakers give them proposals that they say will help things in the legislature to work better. Voters are often supportive.
ES: (03:42):
ED: So, one of the things that comes up again and again is the cost of the legislature. Did you find that voters were consistently, over all those centuries, concerned about how much they're spending on their legislature?
PEV: (03:56):
They're always worried about costs and certainly back, and you go back in early in American history and costs were real in terms of the total government expenditures and now of course what you spend on the legislature is trivial given the size of government. But that's one of the things that people are always sensitive about is the idea that this is going to be expensive and it's going to be paid for by the taxpayers. And so they want to be assured that they're getting their money's worth when it comes to paying lawmakers, lawmakers really do have to convince them that it's important to be able to attract good talent in the American system. You have to pay to get people to serve and an argument that's not always winning, but it's one that they always make.
ES: (04:45):
I think kind of along those same lines is this tension between efficiency and effectiveness, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and why those two goals figure in these ballot measures that you reviewed.
PEV: (05:02):
There are a lot of rules governing how a legislature operates and voters have generally been willing to relax some of those rules, things like three reading rules and having to actually literally read bills as they're brought up on the floor or read them all the way through, which can be enormously time consuming. And so voters are very good about trying to get the legislature to speed things up a little bit. The question of effectiveness is of course, whether you're making policies that in the end accomplish what the legislature would like them to accomplish, and that's a little harder to do. That takes more time and certainly a lot more deliberation. And so efficiency and effectiveness are always intention with one another. If you want to be completely efficient, you may not be effective because you may not be able to subject legislation to the deliberation and review and vetting that's necessary to work through all the problems that may be embedded in them.
ES: (06:03):
Voters consistently would support reforms that they thought were going to improve the performance of legislatures. That at least was what I drew from the book. Is there any way to measure whether voters thought on balance that these reforms did produce a more effective legislature or a better performance by the legislature?
PEV: (06:23):
That's hard for them to do. Most voters really don't know what's going on in the legislature most of the time. And if you look at public opinion surveys generally, they will say that in most states, people don't think the legislature is performing particularly well, particularly in bigger states where there are more conflicts, voters tend to look askew a little bit at the legislature and its performance. But I think if you look to political scientists and as best we can to try to come up with objective measures of how well legislatures are performing, given the enormous tasks that they're asked to undertake, they generally do pretty well and they have increased their ability over time with more staff and more resources to better understand some of the problems that confront their constituencies. And so it's a mix of voters probably will never be thrilled with the legislature, but much of the time they're probably content with what they're getting.
ES: (07:28):
You reviewed--astounding as the only word I can think of--an astounding number of newspaper articles, opinion pieces in order to give you kind of a real time look at the debates that were going on around these ballot measures. And by and large, I would say that the quotes that you had did not hold legislatures in particularly high regard. They're often rather critical. I wonder what you took from your immersion in this press coverage over hundreds of years. I mean, what did you come away with?
PEV: (08:02):
Well, I was looking at newspapers and what coverage they gave to ballot measures before the election to try to get some sense of what the issues were and what the arguments were being made for and against various measures. And certainly when you look at not just editorials, but letters to the editor and newspaper reporters and some of the other people commenting on legislation, there's always deep skepticism about lawmakers and their motivations and why they're pushing the policies that they're pushing. And I think that's probably healthy. It's probably good for us to keep in some way, a close eye on what's going on to try to avoid the worst outcomes in legislatures. And I think that comes through in a lot of the editorials and the other commentary in the newspapers. There really is a genuine sense that they want things to work better than they appear to be working. And they would like rules and regulations in place governing legislators and the legislator process that would help the legislature make better decisions. And they may have made, they don't really have many opportunities to vote on the resources given to legislatures in terms of staff. But even there on the few occasions when they've been asked to vote on it, most voters would like to give the legislature what they need to do a better job than what they think they're doing right now.
ED: (09:34):
Thanks, Pev. I'll be right back after this short break. With the rest of our discussion,
AD (09:40):
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(10:13):
ES: I am back with Pev Squire discussing his new book, “Reforming Legislatures: American Voters and State Ballot Measures 1792 to 2020.” I wanted to ask you about uniformity. Uniformity has a surprising amount of importance for voters over a range of topics. Can you talk about that?
PEV: (10:33):
An effective appeal is to be able to say that our state is out of step with the rest of the country, then we're not doing things like most other legislatures. And that's actually a fairly rational approach because you can say if you look at other legislatures, these policies have proven to be successful. These procedures have proven to be successful, and that's a pretty good guide for voters in trying to change their legislature. And so nobody wants to sort of stand out as being completely different from everybody else. The exception of course is Nebraska, which sort of revels in being different from everybody else. Even though in the last couple of sessions there have been some proposals to make even Nebraska more like the rest of the country. But I think for the most part they want to see things that have been successful. And if you look at what it's done most places you figure that they've adopted those rules because they've worked and it may make sense to change things. So just one example, for a long time Massachusetts had a majority standard, our quorum standard, that was less than a majority. And in the 1890s they finally changed that by going to the voters and saying, we're the only state that doesn't have at least a majority quorum requirement. And the voters were persuaded by that.
ES: (11:59):
Voters seemed pretty clear that they wanted legislators to be responsive to them and they wanted them to be ethical. From your research, what else did voters want? What else really stood out in terms of what they were asking? Through the ballot measures,
PEV: (12:17):
They really do want lawmakers to behave. The strongest support for ballot measures are those which impose the strictest sort of regulations on ethics. They want lawmakers to be responsive to their concerns, and so they would like to put limits on their interactions with interest groups and the way that interest groups can funnel money into the legislative process. And so those are difficult issues to work through. There are lots of First Amendment challenges in devising legislation that can do these things, but voters are deeply concerned that lawmakers tend to listen to the wealthier interest and the interests that are lobbying them on a daily basis and the legislature and not listening as much to their voters back home. And so that's where you see a lot of support for campaign finance regulations is trying to limit those voices that are loudest in the legislature, try to elevate the voices of the voters back home.
ES: (13:26):
When you look over the long history of these ballot measures, there were some instances where voters changed their minds. And I wonder if you could talk about why that was and if there are particularly buckets of things that voters decided maybe this wasn't such a good idea.
PEV: (13:44):
For the most part, voters have been remarkably consistent over time, but there are a couple of areas where they have made major changes in the way they view the legislature and how it should be structured. Most of these changes occurred in the middle of the 20th century. Up until the middle of the 20th century, most voters thought the legislature was fine just meeting every other year in biennial sessions. And that changed really in the 1950s, early 1960s. There was a major movement to go back to annual sessions, which had been the ideal when the country was first formed. And so voters kind of came around to understanding that the legislature was being asked to do so much that you really couldn't wait two years to make decisions that you really did need to meet every year. And another area where they changed was how the legislature should be apportioned.
(14:37):
Up until well into the 20th century, voters were comfortable with the idea of having a representation by counties or by town, which would mean that urban areas were underrepresented and rural areas were overrepresented. But in the early 1950s into the early 1960s, they began switching over to the notion of one person, one vote in advance of what the Supreme Court did. This was before the Supreme Court weighed in, so their Supreme Court sort of settled the issue, but they were just following where public opinion had already arrived that legislative districts should be based on population rather than on area.
ES (15:17):
As we wrap up here, I want to return to something that you mentioned at the top of our discussion, and this is this notion that people love their legislators, they hate the legislature. This really seems to me to be kind of a core thing that you're addressing here. I wonder if you would just elaborate on that a little bit more.
PEV: (15:37):
This was an idea that was articulated by a famous political scientist by the name of Richard Fenno, who was a great student of Congress, and he was the one who suggested that people love their legislators and keep reelecting them at the same time that they don't rate Congress very highly. And what I sort of discovered when you ask voters to make real choices with ballot measures, not just responding to survey questions, but actually having to make decisions that have consequences through ballot measures. For the most part, they don't really love their legislators. They may reelect them for a variety of reasons, but they want to impose ethics regulations on them, and they're not really enthusiastic about paying them more than they pay them right now. And at the same time, they don't really love their legislatures, but they don't hate them. They would like their legislatures to function well and be able to make decisions and that they want to go to, for example, annual sessions rather than biennial sessions as a way of allowing them to address all the problems that need to be resolved. And they're willing to give them a chance when lawmakers come in and put things on the ballot that they tell voters will help the legislature become more efficient and more effective in making their decisions that voters are generally pretty supportive of backing those things. So again, they may reelect their legislators, but they don't necessarily love them, and they may rank their legislature at the moment, not as highly as the legislature would like, but they're willing to give legislators and legislatures the opportunity to improve the legislative process.
ED: (17:27):
Well, I think that's a great note to end on, and I think that, I thought I knew a lot about legislatures and I know a lot more after I read your book, so I appreciate that and I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. Take care.
PEV: I'm happy to do so. Thanks.
ED: I've been talking with Squire about his new book, reforming Legislatures, American Voters and State Ballot Measures 1792 to 2020. Thanks for listening. You can search for NCSL podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast are American States dives into some of the most challenging public policy issues facing legislators, our occasional series across the aisle, feature stories of bipartisanship. Also check out our special series Building Democracy on the History of Legislatures.