Unorthodox Lawmaking and Legislator Productivity: Lawmaking Productivity Metric

• In Event: The Substantive Representation of Women

Abstract

Members of Congress can make law via three mechanisms: (1) bill sponsorship and cosponsorship, (2) bill amendments, and (3) unorthodox lawmaking, such as incorporating language into omnibus legislation. We measure lawmaking productivity in each of these areas for Members of the 103-114th Congresses. In addition to using widely available data on bill sponsorship/passage, cosponsorship, and amendments, we create a bill text reuse measure to identify instances of unorthodox bill influence.

We weight and combine achievements from each of these lawmaking mechanisms to create our Lawmaking Productivity Metric (LawProM), as well as two less conservative companion scores, HouseProM and ProM. We find that women disproportionately enact policy through unorthodox lawmaking, which means that existing measures under-credit their effectiveness vis-à-vis our scores.

Authors

• Mandi Eatough, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Jessica Robinson Preece, Brigham Young University