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5. The Institutionalization of Black State Legislative Power
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Chapter 5 The Institutionalization of Black State Legislative Power If you try to kill the king, the saying goes, make sure you kill him. This is a lesson the black state legislators from Massachusetts learned the hard way. Two years after the bruising 1996 battle for the speakership of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the Massachusetts Legislative Black Caucus (MALBC) was still paying the political price for having sided against the eventual winner, Speaker Thomas Finnerman. It’s hard enough being one of the smallest black state legislative caucuses in the country. The MALBC has never nearly had enough members to place at least one legislator on every committee, and chairmanships will always be rare by virtue of their small numbers. But when a speaker you opposed has a long memory, trying to gain institutional power only becomes harder. After suffering through the 1997–1998 session without chairing any committees as possible punishment for backing another speaker candidate, things only got worse for the MALBC: It was reduced from seven members to five after losing two house members during the 1998 elections. And, although Speaker Finnerman did assign one of the surviving legislators to a chairmanship, the Bay State Banner referred to the second-tier committee as having “little influence over significant legislation. Ways and Means it [was] not.”1 As the Finnerman episode illustrates, institutionalized black power is the by-product of two important factors. The first is the degree to which black state legislators are incorporated within the legislative power structure—as measured by their numbers and bloc voting power as well as their formalized roles on committees and leadership positions. The second is how the legislative context in each state—including such factors as the governor’s power, chamber rules, or the strength of the state’s interest group community—mediates the exercise of incorporated power. 109 Quantifying incorporated black legislative power is not easy (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1984, 1990; Nelson 1991). Influence in any legislature is exercised in ways unseen and impossible to measure. Examples of such influence run the gambit: the line added to a bill at the eleventh hour by a subcommittee chair; the deal cut in the cloak room among party leaders before a committee meeting to get something on (or off) the agenda; the logroll pact between two legislators who need one another’s votes. It is equally impossible to quantify the leadership abilities of individual legislators, such as their bargaining skills or the power of their reputations in the chamber. Nonetheless, by surveying the formal institutional positions held by black state legislators we believe we can produce strong proxy measures for black state legislative incorporation . Before proceeding to measurements of incorporated black legislative power and analyses of the states’ contexts, we offer a brief review of the literature on legislative role theory. RACE AND POWER IN THE MODERN LEGISLATURE Legislative outcomes can be best understood as the sum of purposive decisions made by actors using their respective institutional roles in an effort to maximize their power. In a groundbreaking article, Nelson Polsby (1987) argued that the institutionalization of the House of Representatives enables it to succeed in representing a variety of constituent and member interests, while adjudicating between competing claims for resources. Polsby asserts that an “institutionalized organization” conforms to three major characteristics: (1) a differentiation between members and nonmembers; (2) an explicitly complex system of relationships in which some functions are separated and others are wholly interdependent; and lastly, (3) universalistic rather than particularistic criteria in prescribing behavior for its members. Polsby’s focus was national, but Alan Rosenthal makes a parallel point about the significance of roles within state legislatures. “State legislatures, like Congress, have norms that are distinctive from those of other social groups,” says Rosenthal (1998:111). “These norms—‘rules of the game’ or ‘folkways’ as they are also called—constitute an understanding about what is proper and improper conduct in the legislature.” Economist Douglas North (1990) defined institutions as the “rules of the game” that lower the uncertainty associated with social interactions complicated by incomplete information (e.g., informational asymmetries) and the limited cognitive abilities of individuals. Institutions epitomize “bounded rationality” because they reduce transaction costs—the costs of information arising from the need to measure outcomes, monitor other legislators, and enforce agreements among members or between coalitions. 110 The Institutionalization of Black State Legislative Power [44.192.47.250] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:11 GMT) Scholars disagree about whether legislative organization undermines...