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A number of studies over the years have examined the contribution strategies of interest groups active in congressional elections (e.g., Grenzke 1989, Grier and Munger 1993, Hall and Wayman 1990). These studies demonstrate that groups utilize a vari ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research (Martorano Miller, Hedlund and Hamm 2009; 2010) has shown that at the state level, legislative structure and procedure can be dictated to a large degree by constitutional and statutory law. Additionally, a measure of this entrenchment has been developed (Martorano, Hedlund Hamm 2011). The goal of this paper is to better understand entrenchment by identifying the factors that lead to more/less constitutional and statutory entrenchment of legislative structure and procedure as well as begin to investigate how entrenchment impacts legislative performance. We find that legislative structure and process is more restrictively entrenched in initiative/referenda states. We also find that constitutional/statutory entrenchment can help us understand legislative output to some degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American state legislatures have evolved dramatically throughout their history (Squire and Hamm 2005). In particular, the structures, rules and procedures governing the operations legislatures have changed significantly over the course of the 20th and 21st Centuries (Hamm, Hedlund and Martorano 2001, 2006; Martorano 2006). The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical framework for studying the development and evolution of American state legislatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legislative oversight of the executive branch, especially administrative agencies, is a topic of ongoing concern among political scientists, yet comparatively little recent systematic-empirical research on this topic exists at the U.S. state level. One exception, Huber and Shipan, 2002, evaluates the discretion provided to bureaucrats by the legislation being implemented and concludes that the organizational structuring of over-sight activities affects the degree to which legislative statutory decisions are specified in detail, thus micromanaging the administrative actions of bureaucrats. This research sug-gests further examination of how legislative bodies structure their oversight activities so as to assess better their impact on legislative discretion in statute-making. Other research, especially recent work on parliamentary systems, suggests a relationship exists between that the degree to which a legislative committee system "parallels in jurisdic-tion" the executive agencies and the degree to which committees are able to oversee ef-fectively the implementation of their policies by the state's executive branch. Using cur-rent state-level data (i.e., from the 2005-06 legislative session), this paper maps the extent to which the legislative chambers' committee jurisdictions are (1) clear and delineated; (2) are consistent across legislative chambers; and (3) are organized in a manner that par-allels the state's executive agencies, better enabling the legislature through its committees to more effectively oversee policy implementation and program operation. Ultimately, our interest is in what legislative organizational factors facilitate the development of a parallel policy jurisdiction between state legislative committees and administrative agen-cies and the effect of such parallel jurisdiction on oversight. The primary purpose of the current research is to explore the development of a measure indicating the extent of parallel jurisdictions between legislative committees and executive agencies and explore in a preliminary fashion its relationship with indicators of legislative capacity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work by Cox and McCubbins (1993 and 2005) has provided a rich theoretical and empirical base for examining and understanding the strategies parties use in seeking to maximize their control over the congressional process. One essential element in their approach is the degree to which the majority politi-cal party has the ability to dominate congressional standing and procedural committees thus controlling the legislative agenda. Agenda control provides a strategy for majority parties to dominate the legislative process rather than use disciplined party voting on a host of bills as a means of hegemony. Success with this strategy involves the creation of a cartel among majority party leaders that command key aspects of the committee process, chamber leadership, through committee chair positions and via "over-proportional" party membership on committees. Prior research regarding majority party representation (MPR) on committees at the state level determined that in the overwhelming proportion of state legislatures during the 20th Century, the majority party in the chamber did in fact control (by having a majority of members) the vast majority of committees, but usu-ally by very similar margins as found in the chamber; however, exceptions regarding both over-representation (larger majority party percentages on a committee than in the chamber) and under-representation (lower majority party percentages on a committee than in the chamber) were noted and explored. Recent growth in the level of party competition at the state level plus the increasing presence of the Re-publican party there suggests that it is time to re-examine the nature of MPR on state legislative commit-tees. Using data from state legislative committees for all 49 partisan legislatures in 2003-4 and 2005-6 sessions, this current research finds that:*similar trends continue regarding the existence of over-proportional MPR among committees in the 21st century as found previously; *wide variation in the appearance of over-proportional MPR committees is evident across the states and chambers;*the size of the majority party's margin as well as the existence of divided government and larger proportions of Democrats are all associated with the existence and direction of over-proportional MPR;*significant impact on the existence and direction of over-proportional MPR is found for legisla-tive institutional factors like chamber/size the appointment power of the presiding officer, the leg-islative session and legislative professionalization level;*the substantive area responsibility assigned to a committee is also found to have an impact on the level of over-proportional MPR with money and business-commercial committees being the most different; and *a different array of explanatory factors explains positive over-proportional MPR (over-representation of the majority party on a committee) from negative over-proportional MPR (un-der-representation of the majority party on a committee). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]