Cha Ching! How Do Legislative Salaries Affect Polarization in State Legislatures?

Polarization has been a cause of political gridlock and other negative attributes within the state legislature for many years. Many legislatures complain that salaries are too low to allow an elected official position to be their full-time job. Therefore, I explore the theory that some candidates emerge to change the status quo, not for material incentives. Using an original state-level data set from 2007 and 2017 and OLS techniques, I hypothesize that legislative salaries negatively correlate with polarization in roll-call voting on average, ceteris paribus.