The Promise and Challenge of Legislative Caucus Data

Legislative caucuses are alternative organizing mechanisms to committees and parties which prove important for legislation (Hammond 2001). These organizations inform scholarship on polarization, institutional change, and policy outputs. As polarization intensifies across U.S. state legislatures, legislators may seek alternative organizations from parties and committees to facilitate information sharing and policy making as they have at the federal level (Ringe, Victor, and Carman 2013). Identity caucuses, in particular, often pressure legislative institutions to reform discriminatory norms and practices. Finally, caucuses facilitate lawmaking by fostering cosponsorship among members which contributes to legislative success (Holman and Mahoney 2018; Holman, Mahoney, and Hurler 2021). However, data on the number, type, and distribution of caucuses in the 50 U.S. states is difficult to collect and maintain. In this paper, we share descriptive statistics on legislative caucuses in the U.S. including identity, geographic, and ideological caucuses. We identify some strategies for collecting and maintaining this data(which can change dramatically over time) and some of the obstacles of collecting this data while arguing its value for answering some of the most interesting and important questions in legislative scholarship.