Legislative Calendars and Workload Management in Texas
There is a well-developed normative model of how state legislatures ought to use calendars to make the management of their workloads more efficient. State legislatures that follow the normative model identify more and less important bills. Presumably, major and minor bills are treated differently--but are they? This study desegregates the agenda of the Texas Legislature into unimportant, less important, and more important bills as defined by bill placement on calendars. There are systematic differences in the way bills of varying importance are treated. Moreover, the differences are consistent with the contention that calendars can facilitate the more efficient management of legislative workloads.
The State of State Politics Research
Reviewers of the state of state politics research often lament the field's lack of theoretical progress and its fragmented character These conditions per sist yet a review of this research published in the professions top journals over the past decade reveals a substantively rich and often methodologi cally sophisticated body of scholarship. Applying an inclusive approach, this essay examines all research published on state politics over the last decade in the profession's six top journals: APSR, AJPS, JOP, PRQ Polity and SSQ. Trends in substantive focus and the findings of this research are described, as are methodological approaches and innovations. The study takes stock of the progress the field has made and identifies promising avenues for future inquiry. The subfield could advance by emphasizing its unique comparative analytical advantages. These advantages provide an excellent opportunity to evaluate the impact of institutional and environ mental contexts on political behavior, processes and outcomes. The field needs to emphasize the importance of modeling political behavior across contexts, and interactively across contextual and individual levels of analy sis. By so doing, the subfield can show how states matter and also assess the generality of models that focus too often on behavior or process within single contexts.
Influence and Interaction in a State Legislative Body
The purpose of this article is to investigate distributions of influence in a legislative body, to spell out the resulting hypotheses, to introduce a method for estimating the degree of interaction between legislators, and to demonstrate the relevance of specific indicators to the study of legislative behavior. The methodological task falls somewhere between the small group laboratory situation and the more complex arena of community decision-making. Intense observation, control, and precision are sacrificed in favor of a real and vital situation. The analysis of a relatively self-sufficient political entity is lost in favor of maintaining some of the advantages of laboratory research. The universe selected for this study consists of fifty people who must directly or indirectly, but not remotely, rely upon each other in order to satisfy their official purposes.