Tracing Policy in Congress

• In Event: Class and Inequality & Legislative Politics & International Security Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Legislative Politics Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

Legislative studies is often hampered by the necessity of observing policy changes and the preferences and behavior of members indirectly through coarse and heavily constrained outcome measures such as votes and bill passage. However, recent advances in text analysis methods have provided insight into the processes underlying lawmaking (e.g. Casas, Denny, and Wilkerson 2020; Preece and Eatough). In this paper, we develop an approach to determining how individual policy provisions move through the legislative process in the US Congress by estimating the similarity between the sections of bills considered in Congress, resulting in more than 100 billion pairwise comparisons. We apply these estimates to an investigation of logrolling and party influence, showcasing the variety of ways these data will be of use to scholars.

Authors

• Andrew Ojala Ballard, American University

• James M. Curry, University of Utah

• Kelsey Shoub, University of South Carolina

• Mary Kroeger, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill