‘Can’t We All Just Get Along?’ — The Politics of Civility

This month’s Short Talks from the Hill features Political Science chair and professor William Schreckhise as he discusses his ongoing work addressing American politics, public policy, law, administrative law, and public administration.

Hardin Young: Welcome to Short Talks from the Hill, a podcast from the University of Arkansas. I’m Hardin Young, a research and economic development writer here at the university. Today, I’d like to welcome William Schreckhise, professor of political science and department chair in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. His research addresses American politics, public policy, law, administrative law and public administration. Schreckhise was the first author on the paper recently published in State Politics and Policy Quarterly that examines civility, gridlock, polarization and productivity in state legislatures… Bill Schreckhise, thanks for coming in. 

Bill Schreckhise: Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

HY: So, you and your co-authors examine the relationship between legislative civility and legislative productivity. How did you go about doing this?

BS: So we started off with a national survey. We surveyed state legislative lobbyists, lobbyists who lobby state legislatures. And we picked them because they’re the people who generally know the most about what’s going on in the state legislature. It’s their job to know this sort of thing. So we asked them a bunch of questions and one battery in the bunch of questions we asked them focused on civility. We asked them to rate, in a couple of different ways, how civilly the legislators in their legislature treated each other. From that measure, another research team at Boise State University derived what they call the civility scale. It was an index of the product of these measures. And with this index, we’re able to generate a score for each state that reflects the level of legislative civility that occurs within that state legislature — some kind of measure of how well the legislatures – legislators work together in a civil fashion. And so each state legislature received a score that ranged from about negative seven to close to one, with a zero being the average score.

So we have this measure of legislative civility for each of the states in the union. And then earlier research we looked at what predicts how high those scores are, why some states are more civil than others. And in this round of research we wanted to see if the more civil states were more productive in doing what they’re supposed to be doing. And so we came up with four frequently used measures of legislative productivity. One, how many bills the legislature passed in a two-year period. The percentage of bills introduced that wound up being passed. The number of important bills. And that’s kind of tricky because what one person considers to be an important piece of legislation, others don’t, right? But also you got to weed out the unimportant bills because legislatures do pass a lot of unimportant bills. And we really don’t care about those. So we were able to get our hands on a dataset that somebody constructed that examines legislative innovation, that includes measures that states passed that like somebody wrote about somewhere, or there’s some other reason to be interested in them. So we looked at how many states passed those pieces of legislation as our third measure. And then our fourth measure was whether or not the state passed their budget on time during that same two-year period.

HY: Okay, so newsworthiness was one – kind of the lowest threshold for determining major legislation. Is that fair to say?

BS: The measure comes from Frederick Boehmke at the University of Iowa. And so he’s adapted a measure that’s been used in studies of Congress. And some of those studies of Congress did look at the newsworthiness. They look at the number of lines dedicated in The New York Times, in Washington Post, a piece of legislation as some kind of measure of newsworthiness or some measure of importance. But the problem is you can’t really do that at the state level because you don’t have the same newspapers reporting on the same 50 states. And some states, like Arkansas, their newspapers do a fantastic job of covering their state legislatures. Other states not so much. So instead, it’s usually academics who are writing about this legislation that Boehmke used in his dataset.

HY: Okay. So, in general, what did you find? I mean about this relationship between civility and productivity?

BS: So to start off with, it’s really super important to note that in past studies of legislative productivity, there’s been some measures that come up a lot. Like whether or not that’s a single-party dominated state. You know, one state dominates versus two parties constantly fighting it out. The degree of ideological polarization, even though the size of the state’s population can play a role. So we included all those traditional measures in our models, but then included a measure of legislative civility and consistently the legislative civility came out to be the best predictor. So what that says is even when you take into account the extent of party polarization, the population size of the state, the competitiveness of the political parties, all these other things, the degree to which the state lobbyists rate the legislature as being civil is the best predictor of how many bills that legislature passed and whether or not they pass that budget on time and whether or not they passed some kind of important legislation.

HY: Okay. So this was a strong relationship. So based off that, was there any pattern to what constituted a civil legislature?

BS: Yeah, that’s a really good question. And so one thing that we did early on — we reproduced this in subsequent research — is we created a map. A map that showed graphically how civil each state was. And if you know anything about the political geography of the United States, whenever you’ve got a map that shows anything related to politics, it’s pretty easy to discern some kind of regional trend. So the coastal states will be different from the interior. The South is almost always different than the rest of the country. And in this case, there’s no clear geographical pattern that comes really directly to the eye, right? There are other things that can play a role that you might think should, but don’t. Party polarization really doesn’t. So in states we’ve got very liberal Democrats and very conservative Republicans. They’re just more or less just as likely to get along in states where the two parties are closer together ideologically. Party dominance, it sort of does play a role, but kind of in ways that you don’t think. The more competitive the two political parties are, the more likely they are to get along, which I think maybe says that when the parties are competitive, they have to figure out a way to work together. Whereas when you’ve got a single party dominating the state legislature, that one party can really push things through. State’s population is not really related to civility.

But one thing that we found consistently that comes up that is a pretty good predictor of incivility is the presence of term limits. So states that imposed term limits on their state legislators are generally less civil to one another. Their legislators are generally less civil to one another than is the case where the state doesn’t have term limits. And we looked at this a little bit further and we found that the turnover just plays a huge role. And we can say this because when you look at states that don’t have term limits, but high turnover, they’re less civil than the states that don’t have term limits but don’t have high turnover. So when you’ve got a constant crop of new people coming in, they don’t have those established relationships. And even though there’s a lot of reported good reasons for having term limits, we don’t like people staying in office too long. One of the benefits of having people staying in office for a long time is they do develop these long-term relationships with people. And that allows them to work together a little bit better.

HY: Can you give us some examples of states that, you know, were…Or I guess let’s look at some of the extreme, some of the more civil states. Are there any surprises there?

BS: Yeah. So the state of Washington does pretty well. Utah does remarkably well. South Carolina does remarkably well. And these are three states that are both very civil and also very productive. Utah is just remarkably productive. On any measure, they did well. I created a separate index – we don’t report this in the paper — but I just created a separate index that takes into account all four measures. Utah is way, way out on top. The states that don’t do well are Oregon, Oklahoma and North Carolina. And in each state you do see some of the same dynamics playing out that I just mentioned. But there are also some state specific dynamics. So, we actually have engaged in a little bit more research trying to explain why Washington does so well and Oregon does so poorly. They are two states right next to each other, kind of similar climate, similar east-west divide in both states. You’ve got a large population living on the west side of the state, more rural population living on the east side of the state. But in Oregon what you actually have is you have so few population centers on the eastern part of the state that that actually plays a role because you got these ranchers living in eastern Oregon who can’t really understand what the liberal Democrats from the Portland metro area are doing. Whereas in Washington State, you do have Spokane and, you know, where I’m from, the Tri-Cities, which are pretty decent sized geographic areas. So they’re able to build a few more connections across the two sides of the state.

HY: Okay, million-dollar question. Where did Arkansas fall in the scale?

BS: Arkansas does pretty well on the civility scale. So they are above average. They are about 17th out of the 50 states that we looked at. They do pretty well there. Arkansas passed its budget on time. It also passed a fairly high volume of bills for the two-year period that we looked at. It did come number one in the percentage of bills passed. And I think that probably has to do with the fact that the Republicans do have a sizable majority in both chambers of the legislature. So their party leadership can do a pretty effective job in getting the legislation it wants passed, passed through the legislature.

HY: Okay. So this might be beyond the scope of your research, but do you think state legislatures will continue to trend toward more polarized? And do your findings give you any kind of hope for a greater accord in the future?

BS: That’s a really good question. And if you’ve been paying attention to what’s going on in Congress, polarization is a huge problem, right? The best measures we have that Democrats in both chambers of Congress are becoming more liberal and the Republicans are going more conservative. And we tend to attribute Congress’s problems in getting stuff done today as a result of that ideological divergence between the two parties. At the state level, I’m not sure that’s really the case — that the polarization is playing that large of a role. Polarization is not a really good predictor of legislative civility. Civility is a really good predictor of legislative productivity. So at the end of the game, if you really want the government to get stuff done, you have to focus on the civility because the polarization stuff just really doesn’t matter all that much. Polarization does play a role in determining productivity when you don’t really include civility.

I know this is getting kind of complicated, but we actually found that legislative civility can compensate for the ill effects of polarization. And by that, I mean this, when we look at whether or not a state passed its budget on time, all civil states passed their budgets on time. They’re very likely to pass their budgets on time, regardless of the extent that they were politically polarized. But when you move to the other end and you look at the states that were less civil, polarization is a really good predictor of whether or not they did not pass their budget on time. So civility can actually compensate for the ill effects of ideological polarization. So as long as we encourage our legislatures to behave in a civil way, as long as we promote that, as long as that becomes a priority for both parties’ leaderships in the chambers of the legislatures, then I think we can look forward to a future where states continue to be fairly productive. And states are relatively productive, especially when you compare it to the U.S. Congress.

HY: Let’s say that the party leaders from a state that’s low in productivity and civility come to you and say, “Bill, what are some things we might be able to do to kind of get people on board with this or to increase our civility?” Are there any suggestions?

BS: Fortunately for them, there actually is an organization that does promote this. It’s the National Institute for Civil Discourse, which is an organization out of the University of Arizona that was formed in the wake of the shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. And academics and practitioners and even political leaders came together and said political violence and a lot of the conflict we see in the U.S. right now is a product of this incivility. So part of the mission of that organization is actually to go to state legislatures and encourage them. They actually hold these retreats where they encourage them to treat each other in a civil way, which I think is fantastic. We haven’t done an assessment to see whether or not these retreats are effective. And of course, I would say the states who are most concerned about incivility are the ones most likely to accept the invitation from the organization to have these sessions. So you really can’t really do a good job of discerning the effect of these things, but at least somebody is thinking about it. And also I would say just the presence of this organization and a lot of other organizations are encouraging us to think about civil discourse in a broader way.

A lot of the problems, I would say, in modern politics, a lot of the things that I’m concerned about have to do with how we treat other people that we disagree with. And I would say social media has played a huge role. I don’t know anybody who hasn’t gotten into a political fight on social media, right? I would say there’s some cause for optimism, however, because I would say, more so today than when social media hit the scene like 15 years ago, we’re more likely to restrain ourselves because we’ve finally come to the conclusion that we’re not going to convince somebody through a comment on a posting. So, I would say there’s some kind of cause for optimism that maybe, just maybe, as a society, not just the state legislatures, but as a society, maybe we’re coming to a point where maybe we should rethink how we disagree with people on politics.

HY: Bill Schreckhise, thanks for coming in.

BS: Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it.

Matt McGowan: Short Talks from the Hill is now available wherever you get your podcasts. For more information and additional podcasts, visit ArkansasResearch.uark.edu, the home of research and economic development news at the University of Arkansas. Music for Short Talks from the Hill was written and performed by local musician Ben Harris.

A version of this story also appeared in the University of Arkansas’ Arkansas Research publication.