The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture by Wilson Charles Reagan Bond Bradley G. Ely Jr. James W

Author:Wilson, Charles Reagan, Bond, Bradley G., Ely Jr., James W.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2008-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

Legislatures, State

Though governors and senators have been famous as individuals, the office of state legislator has best embodied the stereotype of the southern politician. The white male lawyer cum country bumpkin who rants against Yankee capitalists, spouts racial slurs, and is careless toward public policy embodies the stereotype. Whatever the validity of that image in the past, it is far from accurate in the 21st century. Southern legislatures as institutions and legislators as members have been in the midst of changes for a good while. Although some of these changes reduce regional differences, others underscore the distinctiveness of the South. Much of the change has come as a result of legislatures’ gaining the power to counterbalance that of southern governors.

In the last half of the 20th century similar developments in southern and nonsouthern legislatures reduced regional differences. State legislatures in the 1950s, for example, commonly met only in biennial sessions, with an especially large proportion of southern legislatures fitting this pattern (70 to 90 percent). By 2003, only four of 11 southern states met biennially. The shift to annual sessions has been an important step toward active and informed participation in shaping state public policy.

Southern state legislatures traditionally had more committees than did their northern counterparts, but the number of committees per legislature in both the North and the South has been reduced dramatically in the last three decades. In the process, the disparity between the two regions has lessened. Both changes—increase in frequency of sessions and reduction in the number of committees—were vigorously advanced in the 1960s and 1970s as essential reforms to increase the capacity of legislatures to act. Both trends have been as fully felt in the South as nationally.

Likewise, legislatures throughout the country became quite similar by the 1980s in the availability of staff support for members and committees. By then a quarter of the legislatures in each region provided professional assistance, and close to a majority of states provided only secretarial and other nonprofessional assistance. Today 10 of 11 southern states provide year-round staff support for legislators, usually as shared assistance for committee work, but sometimes serving individual legislators. Another indication of interregional similarities among state legislatures is seen in their attempt to control federal funding. Both state governors and legislatures want control over the disposal of these funds. About a quarter of the states, North and South, leave considerable discretion to their governors, but about 40 percent of the legislatures in each region take active steps both to monitor and to decide upon the allocation of such federal funds.

Regional differences, however, still persist. Southern legislatures, for example, on the average consider fewer bills per session but enact a larger number and a higher proportion of all bills introduced than do those outside the South. In 2003 southern legislators introduced 21,593 bills and passed 4,110 of them, which represented about twice as many bills as introduced in nonsouthern states and about twice as many passed as elsewhere in the nation. A higher proportion of southern

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