Explaining Public Attitudes on State Legislative Professionalism

Jeffrey Milyo, David M. Konisky and Lilliard E. Richardson, Jr.

No 812, Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Missouri

Abstract: Scholars have long argued that state legislative professionalism, or the provision of staff, legislator salary, and session length, has behavioral incentives for legislators and implications for legislative capacity. Scant attention, however, has been devoted to public attitudes on the provision of these legislative resources. Using survey data on preferences for features associated with a citizen legislature versus a professional legislature, we examine the contours of public attitudes on professionalism and test models on the factors associated with these attitudes. Results suggest partisanship, trust, and approval of the local delegation matter, but the factors differ by the legislative professionalism of the respondents state and for low versus high knowledge citizens.

Keywords: Legislative Professionalism; Public Opinion; Political Economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H79 H83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pgs.
Date: 2008-10-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pbe and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wJCHGCz5GV3sypvHj ... DL4/view?usp=sharing (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:umc:wpaper:0812

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Missouri Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chao Gu ().