Representation in State Legislatures

Professionalization and Public Opinion of State Legislatures

Directing Discipline: State Medical Board Responsiveness to State Legislatures.

State medical boards are increasingly responsible for regulating medical and osteopathic licensure and professional conduct in the United States. Yet, there is great variation in the extent to which such boards take disciplinary action against physicians, indicating that some boards are more zealous regulators than others. We look to the political roots of such variation and seek to answer a si...

Angela Burnette Women ' s Representation in National Legislatures : The Hungarian

Women constitute over half of the world's population and enjoy, at least in the eyes of the law, full participatory political license-the right to vote and run for any elective office-in nearly all nation states. Despite this apparent environment of opportunity, women remain grossly underrepresented in national legislatures throughout the world. Exactly why nearly worldwide de jure political eq...

African-American Committee Chairs in U.S. State Legislatures

Objective. In this article, we explore whether African-American state legislators have been able to translate election to office into positions of power, particularly as committee chairs. Methods. We cull data from all state legislative chambers that contained a black legislator during two time periods, 1989 and 1999. In doing so, we compare the observed numbers of African-American chairs with ...

Institutions and Representational Roles in American State Legislatures

What is the impact of a legislature’s institutions on the representational roles its members adopt? We address this question by examining the role orientation of state legislators in eight states, explaining why some legislators identify more with a trustee model of representation and others identify more with the delegate model. Using ordinal logistic regression analysis on data from a survey ...