Experience, institutions, and candidate emergence: The political career returns to state legislative service ∗ Joshua McCrain Stephen D. O'Connell This Version: November 16, 2020. Abstract More than half of the current members of the U.S. Congress served in their state legisla- ture prior to holding federal office. We quantify the relationship between state legislative service and career progression to Congress. Using close elections for exogenous assign- ment of political experience across otherwise similar candidates, we show that serving in the state legislature more than doubles an individual's probability of eventually con- testing a Congressional seat relative to a similar candidate who lost in a comparable election; it also doubles the individual politician's probability of eventually winning a Congressional seat. State legislatures thus create national politicians out of otherwise marginal political entrants. We then show that the effect of state legislative service on career progression is larger in more professionalized legislatures, highlighting the role of institutions in facilitating political career progression. Our results hold important im- plications for representation and accountability, and confirm that prevailing institutions can affect political selection via career progression. Keywords: political selection, candidate emergence, experience, political careers, Congress, U.S. politics. ∗Acknowledgements and contact information: We thank Hans Hassell, Zoe Nemerever, James Reeves, Joel Sievert, and Olga Stoddard for helpful comments. We are grateful to Ryan Brown, Hani Mansour, James Reeves, James Strickland and Jason Windett for sharing data. McCrain: Michigan State University Institute for Public Policy and Social Research. E-mail: [email protected]. O'Connell: Emory University De- partment of Economics and IZA Institute of Labor Economics. E-mail: [email protected]. The views and conclusions expressed in this work are those of the authors. Representative democracy requires a pool of candidates capable of representing constituent preferences, competing for higher office, and producing accountability in incumbent legislators (Schlesinger, 1966). Processes determining candidate emergence ultimately influence the out- put of legislatures and the representation of constituents (Carnes, 2013). Understanding the mechanisms that determine political selection can thus inform a broad set of questions around policy outcomes and representation (Dal B´oand Finan, 2018; Finan et al., 2017). What drives political selection and shapes the pool of candidates for higher office? A large literature examines individual factors that affect candidate emergence, finding relationships with ambition (Maestas et al., 2006), gender (Fox and Lawless, 2014; Brown et al., 2020), personality (Dynes et al., 2019), the returns to holding office (Querubin and Snyder Jr, 2009), and wealth (Carnes, 2018), among others. Institutional factors, such as the role of party preferences, are also important determinants of candidate emergence (Fox and Lawless, 2011; Dittmar, 2015; Butler and Preece, 2016; Hassell, 2017). In this paper, we investigate the role of previous political experience, and the characteristics of the institutions in which politicians gain that experience, on Congressional candidate emer- gence. Service in a state legislature is the most common \stepping stone" on the path to a Congressional seat in the United States; as of 2020, more than half of the current members of the Congress previously served in state legislatures (Behlke, 2017). State legislative experience provides multiple mechanisms for seeking higher office, such as experience in running for office, credentials on which to run again, and access to resources to develop electoral constituencies (Fenno, 1978; Rohde, 1979; Maestas et al., 2006). Our main contribution is to establish and quantify the positive causal effect of state leg- islative experience in furthering the political career of individual politicians. The presence of this relationship has important implications for democratic representation through uncover- ing the mechanisms of political selection, as well as the quality of competition for the U.S. Congress. We also demonstrate heterogeneity in the effect by institutional structure, confirm- ing that characteristics of legislative positions and the institutions in which they are found can influence who runs for federal office. As we discuss in the conclusion, these analyses hold 1 implications for increasing the presence of traditionally under-represented populations in the congressional candidate pool, with consequences for descriptive representation and collective policymaking activity from Congress (Brown et al., 2020; Thomsen and King, 2020). Prior political experience is intricately linked both to personal and institutional character- istics in the analysis of candidate emergence at the national level. A key empirical challenge in examining political selection thus lies in separating the role of candidate characteristics, institutional factors, and legislative experience itself. To establish the effect of state legislative experience on candidate emergence, we employ a regression discontinuity design that allows us to compare the eventual career paths of otherwise-comparable state legislature candidates by using close-won elections as shocks that bestow additional state legislative experience to the winning candidate. Under straightforward assumptions, we are able to hold fixed con- stituency, voter, and candidate unobservables that would otherwise confound an estimate of this relationship. Winners and losers of close elections serve as counterfactuals for each other in the estimation of the effect of state legislative experience on progression to candidacy for { and the winning of { federal office. Using data that cover the universe of elections for single-member state legislative districts from 1967 to the present, we find that an additional term in the state legislature increases the probability of a politician ever contesting a federal election by nearly four percentage points { which is approximately equal to the probability that state legislative candidates are ever observed contesting a Congressional primary or general election. The majority of this effect is realized in the decision to run for a House primary (and then general) elections; there is only a small effect on senatorial candidacy. Not only do these politicians contest up at a higher rate due to their state legislative service, but they are more likely to win a Congressional (House) seat and serve as a federal legislator. But what generates this effect? We investigate whether legislative professionalism { a con- cept that characterizes the nature of the experience as a state legislator via salaries, expected time commitment, and the resources they have available for staff (Squire, 1988, 2007) { is a substantive institutional determinant of state legislators' career progression. Existing work 2 finds that legislative professionalism can enable gubernatorial effectiveness (Dilger et al., 1995; Kousser and Phillips, 2012), constrain unilateral executive action through increasing capacity in legislatures (Bolton and Thrower, 2016), affect a state's credit risk evaluation (Fortunato and Turner, 2018), and broadly shape the behavior of legislatures and their members (Fowler and McClure, 1990; Kousser, 2006). We show that winning a close election for state legislative office in a one-standard-deviation more professional legislature leads to that person being six percentage points (or 25 percent) more likely to run for Congress than a similar candidate who won in state whose legislature has average professionalization. More professional legisla- tures see nearly a 50% increase in the unconditional rate at which their members win House elections.1 Our results also contribute to the understanding of the theoretically ambiguous relationship between legislative professionalism and career progression to federal office. States with more professionalized legislatures may attract and retain more qualified legislators (e.g., Squire, 1988; Butler and Nemerever, 2019), who have higher opportunity costs and are thus less likely to seek federal office. Alternatively, candidates in professionalized legislatures are likely to also be positively selected in terms of conditional political ambition (that is, ambition for higher office realized through service in lower office). In addition, the same legislatures give more resources to legislators, with which they can build electoral constituencies and increase their capacity to contest (and win) a congressional election (e.g., Fiorina, 1994; Berry et al., 2000). While we cannot separate the relative role of selection versus resource constraints, our results show a clear positive relationship between professionalism and upward career progression of state legislators. This suggests that the latter factor { selection on conditional ambition and/or the value of experience in a professionalized legislature { outweighs the role of opportunity costs and other factors that would encourage state legislators to forgo higher office candidacy. Contributing to a literature on how the financial returns to holding office result in political selection (see Dal B´oand Finan, 2018), we also find that states with more stringent regula- 1While of substantial import, the high correlation between subcomponents of professionalism do not allow us to isolate which factors generate the effect on career progression. 3 tions