A Fuller Account of Lawmaking: The Lawmaking Productivity Metric in the Senate

• In Event: Legislative Productivity in the U.S.

Abstract

We expand our existing work on how Members of Congress can contribute to federal statute via three mechanisms: (1) bill sponsorship and cosponsorship, (2) bill amendments, and (3) unorthodox lawmaking, such as incorporating language into omnibus legislation by applying our measurement to U.S. Senators. We measure lawmaking productivity in each of these areas for all Members of the 103-113th Congresses. In addition to using widely available data on bill sponsorship/passage, cosponsorship, and amendments, we use our bill text reuse measure to identify instances of unorthodox bill influence. We weight and combine achievements from each of these lawmaking mechanisms to create a version of our Lawmaking Productivity Metric (LawProM) that accounts for all Members from both chambers, as well as a series of companion scores that can be used to directly compare the relative productivity of Members of Congress both across and within chambers and Congresses over time.
As with our previous work, we examine whether or not different types of legislators - such as women or members of racial and ethnic minorities - disproportionately enact policy through unorthodox lawmaking, leading existing measures of lawmaking to under-credit their overall effectiveness.

Authors

• Mandi Eatough, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Jessica Robinson Preece, Brigham Young University