Abstract
Open hearings in state legislatures were designed to enhance the public’s ability to participate in the legislative process. Ideally, open hearings allow citizens to directly communicate support or opposition on specific policy proposals to the legislators tasked with reviewing and voting on those policy proposals. The literature on descriptive representation has shown many secondary effects including increasing turnout in elections among historically marginalized groups to increasing the introduction and passage of bills that directly affect descriptive groups. Here we ask: do sponsor demographics impact who testifies in public hearings? We seek to understand if descriptive representation affects political participation in a more time intensive setting. We investigate this question using a case study of environmental policy hearings in the 2021 state legislative session for the Maryland General Assembly, including 909 testimonies across 187 bills. Our findings suggest that while white testifiers are equally likely to testify on a bill introduced by a white legislator as a bill introduced by a nonwhite legislator, non-white testifiers are 5.63 times as likely to testify on a bill sponsored by a non-white legislator as they are on a bill sponsored by a white legislator. However, we find no evidence that female bill sponsorship increases participation among women. Our findings indicate that not only does the election of non-white legislators make the legislature more diverse, it also increases diversity in the voices from which the legislature hears.