The Third House: Group Bills in the California State Legislature

The extent to which groups are involved in the legislative process and legislator decisionmaking is of interest to legislative scholars, but difficult to empirically study because of the private information exchanges between legislator and group. This article exploits a reporting institution in the California state legislature to explore group involvement in the policymaking process and legislative effectiveness. In the California state legislature, extra-legislative individuals or organizations that write legislation and secure a legislator to author the bill may be listed as sponsors. Data on group sponsorship activity come from California bill analyses and extend from 1993-2014. This unstudied group tactic is frequently used: 37% of bills introduced and 59% of bills that become law list an extra-legislative sponsor. I show that group sponsorship is significantly related to passage, even after matching on a number of covariates. Also, legislators use fewer group bills and substitute out of group bills as they gain more experience. Overall, the results demonstrate that group input serves as an integral part of a legislative portfolio and the agenda-setting stage of legislative decision-making. ∗PhD Candidate, Department of Politics, Princeton University In 2013, California state Senator Kevin de León proudly touted his introduction of S.B. 402, a bill about breastfeeding protocols in hospitals, via a press release on his personal website. The entity listed for reporters to contact regarding questions about the bill, however, is not Senator de León. Instead, the California WIC Association (CWA), a nonprofit organization of local WIC agencies and the sponsor of S.B. 402, is listed as the point of contact for those interested in learning more about the bill (Rosenhall 2013). In the California state legislature, extra-legislative organizations or individuals that write legislation and secure a legislator to “author” the bill may be listed as “sponsors.” This example is far from an exception; more than 37% of the bills introduced list an extra-legislative sponsor and 59% of the bills that become law are sponsored. The role that groups play in determining the legislative agenda has been a fundamental question since Schattschneider (1960). In this paper, I use California’s unexplored reporting institution to study groups’ policymaking success and legislator motivations for relying on group assistance. This paper examines the interaction between group and legislator in the production and promotion of legislation.1 Some scholars argue that groups “subsidize” like-minded legislators; characterizing the relationship as a partnership between group and politician where the group has information and the legislator has the ability to introduce legislation (Hall and Deardorff 2006). However, previous work does not identify the specific legislative products on which group subsidies are provided and utilized. I use an unexplored reporting institution in the California state legislature to determine the relationship between groups and legislators in the production of legislation. Legislators use group expertise to learn about the legislative process and to boost their success. While neither Congress nor other states list the non-legislative “sponsor” of a bill as clearly as the California state legislature, qualitative evidence suggests that these institutions rely on groups for similar legislative entrepreneurship functions. In their interviews of the Senate Judiciary Com1Throughout the paper I refer to the entities that sponsor bills as groups. A typical definition of an interest group “is an organized body of individuals who share some goals and who try to influence public policy” (Berry 1989). This definition is broader than my conception of a “group” for this paper; sponsors may not be organized individuals but a sponsor intends to influence public policy, inherent in their sponsorship of a bill. Individuals, such as the California Attorney General, also sponsor bills, violating the restriction that an interest group be a collection of individuals.