Measuring the Ideology of Major Laws

• In Event: Lawmaking

Abstract

Representation is the cornerstone of democratic governance, and for this reason, it is the subject of a broad literature in political science. Despite decades of research, however, few studies have compared the ideology of laws with public policy preferences on a large scale (but see Stimson, Erikson and MacKuen (1995) and Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson (2002) for notable exceptions.) While the field has robust measures of the ideology of legislators, congressional districts, and survey respondents, it lacks such measures for individual laws. This makes it difficult to assess whether the U.S. Congress is generating policies that align with public sentiment across various policy topics. Our project aids in filling this void. In this paper, we develop and validate a novel method for creating continuous measures of the ideology of major laws. We use a process originally developed by Casas et al. (2020) to detect “legislative hitchhikers” (bills ultimately passed into law as small portions of larger bills) as a means of identifying the Members of Congress responsible for discrete portions of major laws. We then attach the ideology scores of these lawmakers to the laws themselves. For example, our analysis of the newly enacted Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act detected portions of 131 separate bills contained within it, 32% of which were initially sponsored by Republicans. As a result, our method yields an ideology score for the law which is significantly more moderate than the chamber media. Moreover, just 9 of 30 Republicans who saw their bills become law as part of the omnibus package voted for it. The method we develop, therefore, allows us to capture substantive contributions to major laws by legislators regardless of whether they co-sponsored or voted for the law itself.

Authors

• Mary Layton Atkinson, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

• Benjamin J Radford, University of North Carolina at Charlotte