Political Science

Grove Studies Leadership of Speaker Madigan of Illinois

Posted Jul 5, 2017

                 How can Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) be the least popular and most powerful politician in the state? According to a Paul Simon Public Policy Institute poll this March, 61% of Illinoisans disapprove of the job that Speaker Madigan is doing. This is just slightly higher than Republican Governor Bruce Rauner’s 58% disapproval. Both politician’s high disapproval is a result of Illinois not passing a budget for three straight years and inability to get Illinois financial situation under control.

Illinois is in one of the worst financial conditions of any state in the union. According to a recent Politico report, Illinois has $15 billion in unpaid bills, a current budget deficit of $6 billion, and unfunded pension liabilities of $130 billion. Some bond rating agencies are promising to rate Illinois bonds as junk bonds unless Illinois gets their budget under control. Yet, Rauner, elected governor in 2014 on a promise to improve Illinois’ financial situation is the nation’s most vulnerable governor up for reelection. However, Madigan will easily win reelection for the 23^rd time in November.

Whether Speaker Madigan is the hero or villain depends on your perspective. Republicans view Madigan, who has served as Speaker for all but two years since 1983 and has overseen Illinois’ budget, as a tool of unions, especially public sector unions, and other Democratic interests.  Democrats see him as the protector of the little guy, public education, and basic government services. Regardless, a very unpopular man exerts tremendous power over the legislature and state.

                Yet, the crisis raises the question of how Speaker Madigan has been able to assert so much power to get his way, even when Democrats want to make reforms? This Spring, Matt Grove decided to examine the power of Illinois’ longest serving Speaker and one of our nation’s longest serving state legislative leaders. In this paper, he examines the basis of Madigan’s power by examining who is more or less likely to support his agenda. Overall, Grove finds that when the Speaker takes a stand, Democrats remain largely united as moderates and freshman Democrats are the Democrats most likely to defect from votes. Yet, the large Democratic majority means that even with these defections, Madigan still gets his way.

State Legislative Leadership in Perspective

                Most studies of state legislative leadership fall into two camps. The interest school argues that leaders are powerful because they meet their members’ needs while the institutional school argues that the rules of the party and institution give leaders the resources necessary to convince members to vote as they wish. Madigan can be seen as powerful both because he fulfills members’ needs and the Illinois Democratic Caucus empowers Madigan to achieve its goals.

                The interest based school argues that legislators are rational actors who do things in their electoral, policy, and power interests. Holbrook and Tidmarch (1993) argue that leaders become powerful serving their member’s electoral interests as leaders provide government aid to a district to help a member get reelected or allows them to avoid taking tough votes so they can demonstrate their independence and remain in office. Moreover, Mooney (2013) argues that ideologically cohesive caucuses are more likely to empower leaders because they all basically agree on what government should do. These empowered leaders can then use the resources at their disposal to incentivize members to vote a certain way to advance those policy objectives.

                In contrast, the institutional school posits that leadership comes from institutional rules. The most powerful party in every legislature is the majority party. Thus, majorities write rules to help the party maintain procedural control over the legislature (Kim and Phillips 2009). These members vest most of the power in the leadership who then appoint committees who make sure that legislation that benefits the party advances (Anzia and Jackman 2012). These empowered leaders use the rules to help the party pass policy the state would appreciate so the party would be popular which would aid each party candidate’s reelection. Party leaders are also more powerful when the legislature is a more professional legislature as members delegate policy leadership to legislative leaders while members pursue reelection (Clucas 2007). Moreover, larger party majorities tend to be powerful as the party can suffer more defections and still achieve its priorities (Richman 2010).

                Looking at Speaker Madigan, he basically fits all these categories. As a long serving Speaker, he can help members’ get the electoral and other resources necessary to win reelection. Illinois is a blue state and rather liberal which means the House Democratic Caucus is largely liberal and ideologically cohesive. The rules favor the majority in Illinois, and Madigan is a master of procedure who knows how to use the rules to accomplish his goals. Finally, he has a large majority in the chamber and Illinois is one of the most professional legislatures. His experience, knowledge, and political skill clearly make him a powerful leader work.

Party Leadership in the Illinois State House

                If Speaker Madigan is so powerful, which members are more likely to defect? In this study, Grove argues that moderates, electorally vulnerable members, and freshmen Democrats are more likely to defect. First, moderate members of a party are likely to defect. These members have differing ideological preferences and thus are less likely to support with the party. For these members, their policy beliefs are usually more important than their party. Their moderation comes out more clearly when the party takes an ideological position, which is likely with a very cohesive caucus.

Second, the electorally vulnerable are more likely to defect from the party position. The most electorally vulnerable members are those who represent a district that favors the other party or barely favors one’s own party. These members cannot rely solely on party members in their legislative district to win reelection and will make votes that will make them seem more independent to build a bipartisan coalition to keep them in office.

Third, freshman members are more likely to defect for two reasons. First, they are not socialized into the partisanship of the legislature. As new members, they must learn the formal and informal rules that make one an effective legislator. This learning takes time so these members may not understand the role that partisanship plays in the legislator and thus tend to vote their personal or district beliefs. Second, these members may have run to the legislator against the existing leadership. Madigan’s disapproval is not a recent phenomenon. With Illinois in such a poor financial situation, these members may have run against Madigan and promising to make tough decisions. Thus, these members have extra incentives to vote against the party to prove they are remaining true to their campaign promises.

Research Design

This paper uses the 98^th Illinois House of Representative (2013-14) as a case study of Madigan’s leadership. The strength of leadership will be evaluated by examining the probability that members break the party line. The less members vote with the party leadership, the stronger the party leadership. The more members vote against the leadership, the weaker the leadership is. To determine party leadership, Grove identifies the party leadership votes or the votes when the two party leaderships oppose each other. To identify a party leadership vote, he identifies the votes when the Speaker, Majority Leader, and two Deputy Majority Leaders vote against the Minority Leader and two deputy Minority Leaders. The fact that these leaders vote against each other is a good indicator that these are votes the party leaders consider important and whip members to support the party position. These party lines votes were determined by going through the journals of the Illinois State House of Representatives for the 98^th General Assembly. When these votes were identified, Grove recorded the vote of each member as voting with the party, against the party, or not voting. He then calculated a party leadership support score for each member.

Next, he identified his independent variables or those variables that would explain defections from the party. First, he used Shor and McCarty’s (2011) ideological scores for state legislators to identify moderates and ideologues. These scores range from -2 (extreme liberal) to 2 (extreme conservative) with 0 being the median voter in the US (i.e., the ideologically most centrist voter in the US). Shor and McCarty make these calculations by using the votes to legislators and then using the votes of legislators in national office to determine the overall ideology of the legislator vis-à-vis all other legislators. He then recoded the variable so that the more moderate members would be positive and the extreme members would negative. This recoding would treat moderates and extreme members the same in both parties.

Second, electoral vulnerability is determined by the percent of the vote that President Obama received in the 2012 election. Since most voters vote a straight ticket, presidential vote is a good measure of district partisanship. The district partisanship of each district is calculated by percentage of the vote that President Obama received in that district in 2012 minus the percentage of the vote President Obama received nationally in 2012 (51%). The district presidential vote comes from Daily Kos elections.

Finally, tenure is determined by the number of terms each legislator has served in the House. Grove got this information from the Illinois General Assembly website for the 98^th General Assembly. From this he created two variables. Tenure is simply the number of terms a legislator has served. Freshman Democrat is a dummy variable indicating whether the Democrat is in one’s first term (1) or otherwise (0).

Results

Overall, this data shows that the Illinois State Legislature is very liberal, very Democratic, and very partisan which are all important sources of Speaker Madigan’s power. The average party leadership score of all members is 93%. Democrats have a party leadership support score of 89% and Republicans have a party leadership score of 95%. Thirty-members had a perfect score and one hundred and nine members had scores 90% and higher. Rep. Joe Franks (D-Marengo) had the lowest party leadership support score of 15%. Republicans are more coherent because as a small minority, they must stay together to have any kind of influence. The Democrats have the ten lowest party leadership support scores which is not surprising since the Democratic majority is so large that they do not need the party to stay together unanimously.

Forty out of the 122 voting members of that 98th session were considered very extreme with ideology scores below -1 with the most extreme member being Rep. Arthur Turner (D-Chicago) with a score of 1.903 while the most moderate member is Rep. Michael McAuliffe (R-Chicago) with a score of .205. The Republicans have a mean ideology score of .468 while the Democrats have a mean of -.916.

Electorally, seventy-four of the 122 members’ districts are Democratic leaning with House Majority Leader Barbara Currie having the most pro-Obama district voting for Obama with over 94% of the vote and Rep. John Bradley (R-Marion) having the most Republican district with Obama only receiving 38.7% of the vote. Four Democrats represent Republican leaning districts and forty-three Republicans represent districts that supported President Obama. The mean Democrat Obama presidential vote percentage was 70% and the mean Republican Obama vote percentage was performed 57.85%.  

Turning to the results in Table 1, we find that when members defect from the party leadership, the defectors are usually moderates and freshmen Democrats. The negative relationship of moderate with party leadership score indicates that the more moderate the member, the lower their party leadership support score. This result supports the contention that moderates are more inclined to vote their policy preference, especially when the party supports an ideologically extreme measure.

Table 1

Explanations for Defections from Party Leadership

** Significant at the .01 level.

The tenure variable barely misses statistical significance but does suggest that long serving members do have higher party leadership support scores. The negative relationship with freshman Democrat combined with the positive relationship with tenure tends to support the socialization rationale as longer serving members have adapted to the strong leadership style of Speaker Madigan and are less likely to buck him while freshman still have not learned the norms of the legislature and the importance of supporting the party.

Finally, the lack of a relationship for district partisanship is not that surprising when Illinois is so Democratic. With such a large majority of legislators representing Democratic leaning districts, district partisanship may not influence voting. If anything, we would expect more Republicans to defect since most of them represent Democratic leaning districts but they have a higher overall party leadership support score. This result suggests that Republicans can do other things to appeal to constituents and remain in office.

Conclusion

The Illinois state legislature clearly has strong leadership in both parties. For this case study, ideology and socialization tend to support Speaker Madigan. With a fairly liberal caucus, Madigan, who is more liberal than the mean Assembly Democrat, can push the party to the left with little dissent. The fact that he has a large majority means that even if moderates do defect, he still has a working majority to advance the party’s agenda. Moreover as the Democratic leader of over 30 years, he understands the norms of the Assembly and has shaped the norms so that members learn to adapt to a system that benefits his power and the Democratic Party.

Thus, it should be no surprise that Democrats can raise taxes by a 1/3 and be most likely able to override Gov. Rauner’s veto as he can continue to protect the interests important to the Democratic Party. Moreover, Rauner’s low approval means that a Democrat will likely win in November which may allow the Democrats to return to business as usual, until the bond agencies finally force Springfield to tackle their financial problems.

From a political science perspective, there are clear ways to build upon this work. First, this study examines just one assembly. Perhaps, this assembly is unique in some way that leads to these results. An extended study of multiple assemblies could provide a more clear portrait of Madigan’s power. Second, this study examines party leadership under united government when Democratic Governor Pat Quinn was in office. The past four years has seen the governor and Assembly struggle to run the government so extending the study to a time of divided government may help us understand his power as he would have to pursue different strategies to maintain his power against a powerful governor and advance his policy agenda.

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