editor's introduction: state legislative elections

Editor's Introduction: State Legislative ElectionsAuthor(s): Malcolm E. JewellSource: Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 1-5Published by: Comparative Legislative Research CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/439963 .

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MALCOLM E. JEWELL University of Kentucky

Editor's Introduction:

State Legislative Elections

The papers in this issue were presented at the Conference on State Legislative Elections, held at the University of Kentucky in early March 1990. (Several other papers given at the conference will appear in subsequent issues.)

For many years scholars have been frustrated by the difficulty of studying state legislative elections because no comprehensive dataset existed. Those undertaking research in the area have found data collec- tion difficult and have been limited to analyzing results for a few states and/or a few years.

In 1987 the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan began creating computer files for all state legislative general elections in the 50 states. For most of the states, these computer files are now complete for the elections from 1968 through 1986, and these files will be updated every two years. Legislative primary election files were also created for 14 southern and border states where data were available. The data files are organized by district and also by county. The information in the files is limited to that contained in official election returns, plus information on the incumbency status of all candidates.

Most of the papers in this issue rely heavily on the datasets col- lected and made available to scholars by the ICPSR. The ICPSR legislative election data project and the conference at which these papers were presented were supported by the National Science Foundation (grant number SES-8618482). Neither the ICPSR nor the NSF bears any responsibility for the analyses presented in these papers.

Many of the questions that interest students of state legislative elections are similar to those that have driven recent research on congressional elections. Are legislative incumbents, like their congressional counterparts, winning more frequently or winning by larger margins? If so, is this because legislative districts are becoming safer for one party, perhaps as a result of redistricting, or because partisanship is

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, XVI, 1, February 1991 1



Malcolm E. Jewell

less important and incumbency more important as a factor in these elections? Are there significant differences among the states, caused either by varying levels of professionalism or by different partisan balances?

Recently congressional scholars have argued that, while the electoral margins of incumbents have been increasing, their rate of reelection has not been increasing. James Garand examines these rela- tionships in 16 state legislatures that have used single-member districts exclusively. He finds that, over the 20-year period, there has not been an appreciable increase in the very high rate of incumbent reelection, despite a significant increase in the incumbents' proportion of the vote (from about two-thirds to about three-fourths). One reason for this, according to Garand, is that the volatility of interelection swings has increased from 1970 to 1986.

Ronald Weber, Harvey Tucker, and Paul Brace examine the pattern of competition in the lower houses of 20 states for a longer time period, from 1950 to 1986. They find that there has been a decline in the proportions of both marginal seats and contested seats in almost all of these states. A regression analysis conducted in 14 of these states shows that there was less competition in those states that had the largest legislative resources, in those using multimember districts and, to a smaller extent, in those states where a higher proportion of incumbents have sought reelection. In 6 of the states reapportionment also contrib- uted to a decline in the proportion of marginal districts, but it had less effect on contested races.

Thomas Holbrook and Charles Tidmarch examine one partic- ular manifestation of incumbent electoral strength, the so-called "sophomore surge." The theory is that the first time an incumbent runs for reelection he or she should win by a larger margin than in the preceding election, when the candidate was not yet an incumbent. Sophomore surge is measured as the percentage difference between the two elections, with national partisan trends controlled. They find evidence of the sophomore surge in 31 of the 32 states and 55 of the 59 chambers; they find that the magnitude of the surge has grown sharply over the 10 elections. They find that the sophomore surge has been greater in states where more resources, particularly personal staff, are available to members.

The conventional wisdom among politicians and journalists is that a political party holding a majority in the state legislature and con- trolling the governorship can create a redistricting that will give that party a substantial advantage in subsequent elections. The growing advantages enjoyed by incumbents and the declining partisanship of

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Editor's Introduction

voters lead some political scientists to question whether gerrymander- ing is still an effective instrument of partisan control.

Harry Basehart and John Comer, in an examination of redistricting in the 1980s in 15 states, compare those where the redistricting process was dominated by one party (usually Democratic) with those where it was nonpartisan or bipartisan. They find that the dominant party has gained seats in the first election after districting, but this advantage disappears in subsequent elections. The Republicans have made short-run gains in bipartisan states. Senate incumbents, but not incumbents in the lower house, have tended to benefit from redistricting.

Janet Campagna also examines the effect of redistricting on elections in 15 states with varying degrees of partisan control over the process in both the 1970s and 1980s. She is measuring the effect of redistricting on bias (the advantage enjoyed by a party) and responsiveness (the extent to which an increase in votes produces an increase in seats). She finds that neither bias nor responsiveness is consistently higher in states where one party controls the districting process, nor are either of them higher after a partisan redistricting. There is substantial evidence of bias in the districting systems in many of the states, but it is not consistently related to the partisan control of the redistricting process.

One of the major advantages of getting access to state legislative election data is that we can study how different districting systems affect various aspects of electoral outcomes. While the U.S. House uses only single-member districts, a number of state legislative chambers have used a combination of single-member and multimember districts. Two types of multimember districts need to be distin- guished: "free-for-all" districts, in which all candidates run against each other, and "position" districts, in which each candidate chooses a specific post or position for which to run in the multimember district. States that use multimember districts almost always use one or the other type but not both.

Richard Niemi, Simon Jackman, and Laura Winsky summa- rize information on the changing proportion of single-member and multimember districting systems in the South and in the rest of the country. The data show a steady decline in multimember districts in the South, where they used to be most common. There is little difference between the types of districts in the proportion of incumbents who seek reelection or the proportion who win.

The Niemi, Jackman, and Winsky paper includes an innova- tive suggestion for calculating electoral margins in free-for-all multimember districts. They argue convincingly that one should create a

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Malcolm E. Jewell

series of pseudo-elections, pairing the highest Democratic vote-getter with the lowest Republican vote-getter, the second-highest Democrat with the second-lowest Republican, and so forth. If this measuring tech- nique were generally followed, it would facilitate comparative analysis of legislative races that include free-for-all multimember districts.

One of the major issues involving legislative districting is whether, and under what conditions, multimember districts reduce the representation of minority groups, an issue the courts have frequently grappled with. Bernard Grofman and Lisa Handley, examin- ing the reasons for the increase in black representation in southern legislatures, find that it is largely a result of the increasing number of districts that are substantially more than 50% black. This increase has been in large part a result of the shift from multimember to single- member districts, as a consequence of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1982 amendments to that act. By 1985 black legislators were almost three times as likely to be elected in southern states using only single-member districts as in those using a mixture of multimember and single-member districts.

Malcolm Jewell and David Breaux examine the success of incumbent legislators in both primaries and general elections of southern and border states. There is a very high rate of renomination and reelection, and there is no consistent pattern of greater incumbent success in single-member or multimember districts. Incumbents are more likely to have at least some opposition in multimember free-for-all districts than in multimember position or single-member districts. Over the 20-year period there has been a substantial increase in the proportion of incumbents winning one or both elections without opposition.

The most ambitious, and the most multi-authored, paper in this issue is a comparison of voting turnout in legislative and other elections by Erik Austin, Jerome Clubb, William Flanigan, Peter Granda, and Nancy Zingale. Turnout for the two chambers in the legislature is compared with turnout in presidential and congressional elections and elections to the governorship and other statewide offices. This is the only paper to make use of the county-level files in the legislative election dataset, a necessary strategy because elections for other offices are compiled at the county level.

The most important finding is that voter turnout in state legislative elections closely parallels turnout in the races for other offices. Legislative turnout is lower, but by a small margin, with surges and declines like those in other races. There is nothing distinctly different about state legislative turnout. There are some differences among regions, but these grow smaller over time as turnout rates gradually

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Editor's Introduction 5

decline. An analysis of competition for legislative races in seven states shows that turnout is somewhat higher when races are more competi- tive, but this relationship largely disappears when uncontested races are excluded.



editor's introduction: state legislative elections

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