Benefits of Our Approach
Why use our data and measures?
A More Complete Picture
Congressional scholars interested in identifying legislative “work horses” tend to focus on a single method—traditional bill sponsorship and passage. As a result, less visible means of legislating never enter into current scholarly analyses of legislator productivity.
Account for the Work of Minority MoCs
When we look closely at approaches to lawmaking, we find that women and Black Members of Congress are more likely to rely on less-visible ways of advancing their legislative priorities.
Customizable
LawProM components are easy to mix and match, making it anadaptable dataset useful for manyresearch questionsthat scholars may be interested in. We hope that political scientistsfind LawProM helpfulas they study a wide variety of dimensions of modern lawmaking.
Crediting Invisible Work: Congress and the Lawmaking Productivity Metric
Mandi Eatough, Graduate Student, University of Michigan
Jessica Preece, Associate Professor, Brigham Young University
ABSTRACT
Congressional observers have long been interested in the distinction between legislative “work horses” and “show horses.” However, when scholars operationalize this by measuring legislator productivity, they often neglect many realities of modern lawmaking by focusing on the traditional bill sponsorship and passage process. To better align measurement with practice, we compile widely available data on bill sponsorship, cosponsorship, and amendments; we also use text-as-data methods to credit instances of behind-the-scenes lawmaking via text reuse between bills.We weight achievements from each of these lawmaking methods to create the Lawmaking Productivity Metric (LawProM) for House Members of the 101-113th Congresses. Including methods of lawmaking beyond bill sponsorship provides important insights about who the congressional work horses are. In particular, we find that traditional measures systematically under-count the legislative successes of women and likely Black Members of Congress because they disproportionately legislate in less visible ways.
PI SIGMA ALPHA AWARD
Best Overall Paper Presented at SPSA 2021
MARIAN IRISH AWARD
Best Paper Presented on Women & Politics at SPSA 2021
CQ PRESS AWARD
Best Paper Presented on Legislative Studies at APSA 2020
Interested In This Data?
The development of the Lawmaking Productivity Metric (LawProM) has been a multi-year project and we are excited to finally be at a stage where we can share some of our work. We are looking for researchers interested in preliminary access to beta versions of the LawProM datasets for use in current or future research projects.
These datasets include the following information for all House Members in the 101st to 113th Congresses:
Counts of each legislative action (sponsorship, cosponsorship, amendments, bill text influence) at each stage (introduction, engrossment, enactment) for for each MoC of each Congress
Calculated Productivity Metrics (LawProM, HouseProM, and ProM) for each MoC of each Congress
Associated demographic information for each MoC of each Congress
(Preliminary data for the Senate is upcoming.)
If you are interested in preliminary access to these datasets, please fill out the form below or contact us directly at lawpromdata@gmail.com.
