A Squire Index Update: Stability and Change in Legislative Professionalization, 1979–2021

The Squire Index measuring the professionalization levels of American state legislatures was created three decades ago. In this note, I explain how the 2021 update was compiled. I then document the index’s stability over the years for which it has been measured, present alternative measures to explore a problematic aspect of the index, and finally examine how each of the index’s three components has moved relative to Congress between 1979 and 2021.

A Squire Index Update: Stability and Change in Legislative Professionalization, 1979–2021

Squire

2023

Do State Legislative Staffer Networks Influence Roll-call Voting? Evidence from Shared Personal Staffers in Arizona, Indiana, and New Mexico

Landgrave

2024

Legislative staffers are an invisible force in legislative bodies that provide every imaginable service. It is doubtful that modern legislatures could operate without them. Prior studies of Congressional staffers have found evidence that staffers not only aid but also exert an independent influence on the policy-making process through network effects. In this article, I test if this extends to state legislative staffers using novel data from shared staffer networks in Arizona, Indiana, and New Mexico. I argue that, compared to their Congressional counterparts, state legislative staffers are more akin to ‘clerks’ than ‘political professionals’ and this limits their ability to independently influence policymaking at the state level.

Comparing Three Measures of Legislative Professionalism

Brown,

Mitchell

2024

We evaluate three measures of state legislative professionalism: Squire’s (1992) index that measures professionalism relative to the US House, Bowen and Greene’s (2014b) two-dimensional scaling, and legislative operating expenditures per member, an older measure that remains in occasional use. Replications of 18 recent articles show that these three measures regularly produce significantly different estimates of the effect of professionalism, particularly in longitudinal analysis; when they do, the choice of measure often affects whether other central variables retain a significant relationship with the dependent variable. These divergent results appear to reflect differences among these measures in terms of missingness, vulnerability to outliers, measurement of session length, and whether to benchmark to the US House. Researchers seeking a general indicator of professionalism should consider these differences when choosing an appropriate measure.