Legislative Professionalism

872 Words2 Pages

What legislative professionalism means and what constitutes a professional legislature are difficult questions to answer; therefore, studies of professionalism have employed a variety of measures of the concept (King 2000). In this section, we discuss various measures of legislative professionalism suggested by scholars. In doing so, we point out that their measures are exclusively focused on Western countries with an established democracy and that few studies have given sufficient attention to non-Western countries.
Legislative professionalism refers to the extent to which the legislature can “command the full attention of its members, provide them with adequate resources to do their jobs in a manner comparable to other full-time political …show more content…

The first indices were created by Grumm (1971) and the Citizens Conference on State Legislatures (CCSL) in1971. Their measures were based on what each identified as ideal characteristics of a professionalized legislature (Squire 2007). The CCSL gathered their data through personal interviews in every state capitol between 8 and 20 political insiders. These data were reduced to five categories relevant to legislative capacity on which all states were ranked: functionality, accountability, informedness, independence, and representatives. These rankings were then combined to yield an overall ranking of state legislative professionalism (Mooney 1994). On the other hand, Grumm (1971) combined legislators’ pay, total session length, legislative operational expenditures, staff services, and the number of bills introduced. According to Mooney (1994), this approach is problematic because it combines theoretically reasonable measures of professionalism (e.g., session length) with a measure—number of bills—that is more clearly an output measure (Grissom and Harrington 2013). In response to this criticism, Morehouse (1983) replicated Grumm’s procedures almost exactly for the different period, the only difference being that she substituted the average population per house seat for Grumm’s …show more content…

For instance, in addition to the three common components of professionalism—compensation, staffing, and session length—Moncrief (1994) included turnover rates. According to him, turnover rates are often viewed as a measure of legislative professionalism. Moncrief gave an example of Steward’s (1989, 17) statement that “high rates of legislative turnover, short length of legislative sessions, low salaries, and small staffs are all hallmarks of a non-professionalized legislature.” Next, Mooney (1995) constructed a measure similar to Squire’s, the only difference being that Mooney added the number and structure of committees’ variables to the professionalism index. As another example, King (2000) included compensation, days in session, and expenditures for services and operations per legislator. The modification of Squire’s Index involves the third component, i.e., the expenditures for staff and support services in place of the number of staff members. According to King (2000), this substitution is necessary for the reason that data on the number of staff members are not available for the 1960s. Moreover, he reasoned that expenditures for services and operations are a logical substitute because they tap the same underlying concept and correlate highly with the size of the legislative staff; thus, they have been incorporated in other professionalism indices (Dilger, Krause, and Moffett 1995;

Open Document