Honey, I Shrunk the Legislature
A very encouraging post on the Freakonomics blog today mentions that the Maine state legislature recently proposed a bill that would unify the state’s Senate and House into one representative body, making Maine the second state in the union to go unicameral. Unfortunately, the Maine Senate voted it down.
I call this event unfortunate not just because of the obvious benefit of reduced government expenses (some predicted that moving to a unicameral measure in Maine would save taxpayers a whopping $11 million per two-year legislative session), but because the current bicameral system is truly redundant.
According to this Wikipedia entry, it used to be the case that:
[T]he basis of representation in most state legislatures was modeled on that of the U.S. Congress: the members of the smaller chamber represented geography and members of the larger chamber represented population. In 1962, the United States Supreme Court announced the one person, one vote standard and invalidated state legislative representation based on geography. (One person, one vote does not apply to the composition of the U.S. Senate because that chamber’s makeup is prescribed by the U.S. Constitution.)
So, we now have a case in which 49 states have two houses serving the same purpose: per-capita representation. Nebraska — the one place where this good idea of house unification has taken place — has also adopted nonpartisan elections. The best explanation I have heard for why nonpartisan elections are a bad idea came from David Stokes: Political parties provide a general identification of a particular candidate’s political stances, and help voters save precious time obtaining information about every person on the ballot. Stokes has also written about the problems with nonpartisan elections, as well as ways to improve the cost-effectiveness of state government — right here in Missouri.
Nice post and nice find, Josh. I must say that a 151-member House of Representatives does seem awfully large for a state the size of Maine, but combining into one body would certainly be cost effective. I’d like to see Maine try this, and then for Missouri to give it serious consideration as well.
Hopefully, in the future, somebody will be able to say, “As goes Nebraska, so goes Maine, and so goes Missouri.” I’ll give full SMI props to the first person who tells me where I paraphrased that quote from. No Googling it!
Comment by David Stokes — June 11, 2009 @ 1:22 p.m.
…As Maine goes, so goes the nation?
Comment by Abhi Sivasailam — June 11, 2009 @ 3:16 p.m.
Nope. In the ballpartk though.
Comment by David Stokes — June 11, 2009 @ 4:20 p.m.
So goes Vermont?
(I googled.)
Comment by Sarah Brodsky — June 11, 2009 @ 4:53 p.m.
Sarah got it, although since she admits to Googling it her prize will be downsized accordingly. When FDR won his landslide reelection in 1936, he won every state but two. (At that time, New England was a stronghold of the GOP) His campaign manager, one of the originators of the modern political campaign, Postmaster General Jim Farley, sarcastically joked, “As goes Maine, so goes Vermont.”
Comment by David Stokes — June 11, 2009 @ 5:11 p.m.
Upon reflection, Abhi was pretty close to the answer, but I was thinking of the Farley quote, and most importantly for our point here, thinking of a small number of states, not the entire country, so I have to go with Sarah.
Comment by David Stokes — June 11, 2009 @ 5:19 p.m.
Is there a consolation prize?
Comment by Abhi Sivasailam — June 12, 2009 @ 10:44 a.m.
You will be awarded one paid internship with SMI for the summer.
Comment by David Stokes — June 12, 2009 @ 11:11 a.m.
salaries for representatives are inconsequential part of state budgets. cutting costs is a weak argument for reducing number of reps. higher reps/capita ratio makes individual elections easier to win. strategically we want MORE reps, so increased liklihood some of them will be free-market devotees.
Comment by vroman — June 12, 2009 @ 11:59 a.m.
I’m with Vroman. The large size of New Hampshire’s legislature is one of the most significant contributing factors to the fact that four Libertarians were elected to the New Hampshire House in 1992:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Party_of_New_Hampshire
It’s also one of the reasons that New Hampshire became the most popular Free State Project selection.
Comment by Eric D. Dixon — June 12, 2009 @ 12:27 p.m.
Cost cutting is far from the only argument for reducing the number of reps and combining the bodies. Studies have found that the more elected officials you have in a body, the more that body spends:
http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/1225 (You might note that the paper I linked to actually disagrees with parts of the “Law of 1/N”, but it backs it for the point being discussed here, which is simply the size of a legislature.
I would love to see more free-market devotees in the legislature, but who cares if you have one or two people you like because of a larger legislature when you have also allowed dozens more statists into the body. We could double the size of the US House and get two Ron Pauls instead of one, but that does not mean you are going to accomplish anything by that. So a lot of votes change from 434 to 1 to 868 to 2, so what?
The more legislators you have the more people you have trying to justify their existence with pet projects, stupid laws, etc.
Comment by David Stokes — June 12, 2009 @ 4:29 p.m.
I’ll definitely see what data I can find, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read that larger legislatures tend to experience more gridlock, which is all I really hope for when it comes to legislative action.
Comment by Eric D. Dixon — June 12, 2009 @ 4:36 p.m.
I am with you there, but the most best way to insure gridlock is to have opposing parties in power, like a Republican legislature and a Democrat Governor. When the same party controls everything, even the conservatives start to spend money like fraternity brothers at a bachelor party. (See Washington DC, 2001-2006).
The rules of a legislative body are going to be far more important for the question of gridlock than the size of the body. No matter what the size of the body is, if the leader of the body has the power to push through what they want, they are going to do it. For example, the St. Louis County charter prevents members of the council from introducing spending bills, so from that perspective it does not matter if there are 7 or 700 members, they can’t increase spending. What they can do, if the rules permit the fillisbuster, is slow down, or even just threaten to slow down, the process until they get enough pork in their district to stop. That is the crux of the “Law of 1/N.”
Comment by David Stokes — June 12, 2009 @ 4:47 p.m.
the logical conclusion of “fewer reps is better” argument is single-decision-maker dictatorship. the logical conclusion of “more reps is better” is self-rule.
if you have 500 reps and 1 is hardcore libertarian, and you double to 1000 reps, I think statistically you get more than 2 libertarians in the new overall group. most elections are predominantly decided by ppl who are apathetic party-line followers. there will be a core of libertarian radicals everywhere who have disproportionate influence to the avg voter, simply by caring and dedication. this core is bigger or smaller in every district, increasing reps/cap lowers the threshold level of minimum libertarian supporters to win.
Comment by vroman — June 14, 2009 @ 2:00 p.m.
I don’t know that many libertarian radicals, but being that a couple of the ones I do know never vote, and make non-voting a point of pride, I really don’t see how this idea has the remotest chance of success.
Mob rule is every bit as logical a conclusion of the “more reps” argument as self-rule.
The fewer reps argument does not logically lead to dictatorship in a three branch system of government with checks and balances. It might in a one-branch system, but we don’t have that here, thankfully. And it is moot because I have never recommended any body to be all that small.
In election battles between small groups of dedicated believers, the dedicated libertarians will usually get their clocks cleaned by the group of people who have their livelihoods on the line, either through government jobs, welfare benefits, or similar rewards. I despise it, but it is how it is.
Comment by David Stokes — June 14, 2009 @ 9:44 p.m.
Like Eric, I’m a fan of gridlock, which may have more to do with the whether different parties control the executive and legislative branches, as David pointed out. My kneejerk reaction to David’s first comment, namely “a lot of votes change from 434 to 1 to 868 to 2.” The more important thing here, as somewhat hinted at by Vroman, is that when you double the reps, you probably get more different viewpoints represented, rather than more people representing the same (few) viewpoints. And I’m especially more concerned with going from “435 to 0″ votes to “869 to 1″ votes. We can’t get around the inherent problems of democracy (ie incoherent mob rule) by reductio ad absurdum-ing representative democracy, but I’m willing to hear out those who say more is better.
In particular the argument that legislator’s salaries are an insignificant portion of the budget makes a good point for cost-benefit analyzing adding more reps who might reduce the budget, or at least oppose new spending.
Comment by Josh Smith — June 15, 2009 @ 3:03 p.m.
I’m not sure if one or two houses makes much difference. More importantly, there need to be lots of legislatures. NH has 424 so the people are better represented. Likewise, an Executive Committee of five elected folks shares power with the NH governor. The more spread out the power, the better.
Comment by Keith — June 18, 2009 @ 3:45 a.m.
What I like most about the New Hampshire model is not the number of legislators, but the shortness of the legislative period there. I understand that they only convene for a few weeks each year. No matter how many reps you have, a short session forces them to concentrate on the few things that matter, instead of having to justify their existence with new laws and regulations all the time.
Again though, more legislators does not lead to better government, in the way most of us here would use that term (very limited, etc). First of all, a large legislature can easily focus too much power in leadership, not the average member. More importantly though, the economic research demonstrates that the larger the legislature, the higher the spending. This is not me ranting; this is an accepted rule of public choice economics (with exceptions, of course).
Much of this is covered in detail in my paper: http://showmeinstitute.org/publication/id.177/pub_detail.asp
Comment by David Stokes — June 22, 2009 @ 11:17 a.m.
Farley did not sarcastically joke “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont”.
He predicted it a few days before the election at a Cabinet meeting and sealed it in an Envelope. This sealed Farley’s place in history as a political prophet.
Farley correctly predicted every state that F.D.R. would win and the two he would lose.
He was able to this through the political organization he had built around the country and polling data he had his men collect.
As Maine goes…so goes Vermont!
Comment by sammy — June 26, 2009 @ 7:16 p.m.
Man, I really thought it was Seth Green in Buffy: “As Willow goes, so goes my nation.”
Comment by emily — October 16, 2009 @ 12:29 p.m.
Emily, that was the one I was familiar with as well.
Comment by Josh Smith — October 16, 2009 @ 12:36 p.m.
[...] legislatures. I mentioned this issue briefly in my “Government In Missouri” opus, and Josh wrote a blog post on the subject last year that lead to one of our better comment-section [...]
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