Experts, Amateurs, and Bureaucratic Influence in the American States

Over the past century, the size and reach of American state governments has increased dramatically, altering the balance of power across state capitols. Although state legislatures were historically privileged as “firsts among equals,” modern administrative reforms have transformed state governments from legislative-centric to executive-dominated systems. In many states, part-time citizen legislatures now operate alongside fully professionalized executives. We introduce a new measure capturing the relative professionalism of state legislative and executive branches, allowing us to explore the policy consequences of the rising imbalance of power across states governments. Drawing upon a large panel dataset of proposed and adopted state regulations from 1990 through 2010, we demonstrate that the eroding policy expertise of state legislators has resulted in increased bureaucratic participation in the policy process, as amateur politicians rely more heavily on professionalized executive agencies to define problems and develop solutions. Our findings highlight intuitive, yet understudied, consequences of common institutional reforms and speak to recent and recurring debates about the separation-of-powers and public policymaking. U.S. states universally divide policymaking powers between legislative and executive branches; yet, unlike with the federal government, there is striking variation in the resources, authority, and expertise of these institutions (Krause and Woods 2014). Over the past century, as state governments have experienced tremendous growth, the balance of powers across branches has changed in meaningful ways. Spurred in part by cooperative federal/state policy initiatives following the New Deal, states invested in complex new social and economic programs and have subsequently empowered their executive branches to develop and manage these programs (Elazar 1974). Yet, comparable investments in the resources of state legislatures have been more modest (Kousser 2005), and in the majority of states, part-time citizen legislatures now operate alongside far more professional administration. Although Madison (1788) contended that “in a republican government, the legislature necessarily predominates,” modern state politics is defined by increasingly potent executives amidst the gradual deprofessionalization of state legislatures (Rosenthal 2009). While growing executive predominance should have serious consequences for the development and implementation of public policy, the impact of this trend is not well-understood. This is especially salient now, as reformers consciously work to manipulate institutional influence among the branches. Proponents of term limits and citizen legislatures, for example, explicitly seek weaker legislatures, despite (or, perhaps, because of) mounting evidence that such measures empower executive branches and interest groups to take more significant roles in the policy process (Cain and Levin 1999; Kousser 2005; Miller, Nicholson-Crotty, and Nicholson-Crotty 2011; Sarbaugh-Thompson, et al. 2004). Conversely, reforms targeting the executive rarely seek to weaken the office of the governor or the state bureaucracy, and instead focus on facilitating executive capacity and influence over policymaking. Reflecting both trends at once, Illinois reformers qualified a constitutional amendment for the November 2014 ballot that would have introduced legislative term limits, while simultaneously increasing the governor’s veto override threshold from three-fifths to two-thirds, augmenting gubernatorial power (McGrath, Rogowski, and Ryan 2015). 1 Michigan reformers similarly sought to alter their institutional balance by deprofessionalizing the legislature in 2014, proposing a constitutional amendment to halve legislative salaries and prohibit full-time legislative sessions.2 These Ultimately, the initiative did not reach the ballot, as it was ruled unconstitutional by Illinois courts. This proposed initiative also failed, as proponents did not gather enough petition signatures to qualify