Professional Legislators

542 Words2 Pages

Professional legislators are those elected officials that with long, nearly unlimited legislative sessions, professional full-time staff and a salary put in place that would, and should, allow for full-time public service. In theory, the professionalization of state legislatures opens up the body to more individuals and thus should improve the overall overcomes for the average citizen. In other words, if more people see running for office as an option, then the pool of candidates is larger and statistics would dictate that a larger pool should lead to better candidates getting elected. The implication for the legislatives bodies starts with members serving longer terms, thus forming a more experienced legislative body. In addition, with …show more content…

Legislators in more professional roles tend to be more attentive to constituent concerns and thus to represent their views better in state legislatures. One measure of this effectiveness for the citizens that elect these officials, is a professional legislators’ willingness to be independent in votes from their party’s’ politics. For these reasons alone, professionalism would seem to help a state, because it helps the citizens. A more professional legislature has the ability and time to thoroughly consider policy and policy changes. This would include time to study the success and failure of other states; choosing good policy to implement and forgoing failing policy from alternative states. There is a down side to professionalism in state legislatures. As the jobs are deemed more lucrative, the goal becomes of current legislators is to get reelected. Clucas finds that this leads to two things; first, as mentioned, it leads to individuals voting for their constituents best interest, but on the down side, it leads to a passing of power from the legislature to the executive branch and even more specifically to career public administers. Even with this one downside, professionalism helps a

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