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Carrie Hare
Political Science

Priscilla Southwell, Mentor

Innovation and Motivation in Legislative Behavior: Oregon’s 1973 Senate Bill 100

Oregon’s landmark land-use laws have been lauded, condemned, and researched in order to understand the effect on such factors as sprawl and housing costs. This project seeks to discover what factors made such an innovative bipartisan effort possible. Legislative group behavior is a topic that has not been explored thoroughly. Research uses oral history to examine the behavior surrounding this bill by interviewing several former members of the Oregon House of Representatives. Their responses included a variety of factors for the bill’s success such as the bipartisan nature of 1973 legislature, the influx of women into the legislature, the pioneering leadership of Governor Tom McCall, and the rapid population growth the state experienced during that time. Preliminary results suggest strong consistency between the views of former House members and those of former Senators (interviewed May-July 2000). While different from the traditional legislative history, this oral history offers a unique and irreplaceable first-person perspective of a specific moment in legislative life, one not often available from policy makers.