Bonds. More bonds.

One thing is true of Rhode Islanders: we love a good general obligation bond. We’ve approved 34 of the 35 put to us by the General Assembly in the last 20 years — upwards of $2.26 billion in taxpayer-backed debt. We haven’t just approved them. We’ve APPROVED them by a median margin of 66%. The last time we said no was 2006: $4 million for Fort Adams, which might qualify as one of those “penny-wise and pound-foolish” moments in the grand scheme of things.

Our penchant for laying the full faith and credit of the state on the line has earned us the nation’s highest per capita debt: $10,259. Yet, since 2025 Fitch has upgraded and affirmed Rhode Island’s credit rating at AA+, and S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Ratings have followed suit at AA and Aa2. We may not enjoy Utah’s AAA, AAA, and Aaa ratings, but our creditworthiness is stable and respectable, depreciated primarily by our unfunded pension liabilities. How do we manage this with substantial public debt? The answer might surprise you: our middling General Assembly.

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That isn’t just a cheap shot at Smith Hill. It’s the conclusion of a 2018 study by political scientists David Fortunato and Ian R. Turner, who compared the bond ratings of the 40 states issuing general obligation debt from 1995 to 2010 with how “professional” each state’s legislature is: what lawmakers are paid, how many days they meet, and how much staff they have. Counterintuitively, the more capable the legislature, the riskier lenders judge the state. A well-staffed, full-time legislature can rewrite tax rates, spending priorities, and regulations faster than a bond analyst can update a spreadsheet, and markets don’t like what they can’t predict. A part-time legislature like ours can’t do much quickly; it is, in the authors’ words, “an institutional commitment to the status quo.” The effect is significant: raising legislative capacity by one standard deviation effectively doubled a state’s estimated credit risk — a bigger effect than revenue limits, spending caps, or debt restrictions. Lenders give Rhode Island good marks not because our lawmakers manage our money brilliantly, but because they’re too under-resourced to mess with it much.

“Middling” isn’t an insult; it’s a ranking. Fortunato and Turner’s yardstick, the Squire Index, measures how closely a legislature resembles Congress in pay, session length, and staff. In Peverill Squire’s latest update, based on 2015 data, Rhode Island scored .200 (Congress equals 1), ranking 28th of 50 — well behind California (.629) and Massachusetts (.431), far ahead of New Hampshire (.048). And triple-A Utah? It ranks 46th, at .115. If Fortunato and Turner are right, that’s no coincidence.

Part-time doesn’t mean clueless. Studying 20th century state legislatures, Nancy Burns and her colleagues found that most were neither purely amateur nor purely professional, and that even amateur bodies built “pockets of expertise” where the money is. In citizen-run Vermont, not a single first-term member sat on the House Appropriations Committee in 1981 or 1997. A middling legislature doesn’t leave the budget to amateurs; it hands the purse strings to a few veterans and leaves everyone else without the time or staff to second-guess them. Anyone who follows our state budget through the General Assembly each year will recognize the pattern.

How a legislature is built shapes that pattern. Peter Bucchianeri, Craig Volden, and Alan Wiseman looked at lawmaking effectiveness in 97 state legislative chambers. They found that generous staff support spreads effectiveness to rank-and-file members, but where staff is thin, committee chairs “can often exploit expertise advantages.” A lean legislature funnels policymaking through a handful of chairs and leaders. To a bond analyst, that’s a feature, not a bug: fewer hands on the levers, fewer surprises.

Nor do citizen legislatures earn their good grades by being cheap. Neil Malhotra found that professional legislatures appear to spend more: States classified as professional spent about 5% more per capita than those with citizen legislatures, and states that cap their session lengths spent about 7% less. But once he compared states equally likely to professionalize, the gap disappeared: Big-spending states build professional legislatures to manage big governments, not the other way around. Rhode Island’s bond record proves a part-time legislature can borrow with the best of them because lenders reward predictability, not thrift.

There is a catch. Squire’s review of the research notes that more professional legislatures are associated with “better funded state pension systems” — the very liability that keeps Rhode Island from a higher rating. But that’s a commentary for another day.

In the next few weeks, Rhode Islanders will be asked to approve another $600 million in general obligation bonds. History suggests these will pass, and by comfortable margins. The evidence suggests Rhode Island’s creditworthiness will remain unscathed — because of how little our middling General Assembly is equipped to change.

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Courtesy of Rhode Island Current