Bill Introductions Research Articles

Editorial Introduction: Policy entrepreneurs, science and learning, collaboration, and more

Editorial Introduction: Policy entrepreneurs, science and learning, collaboration, and more

Gendered Polarization and Abortion Policymaking in the States

Abstract Widening, asymmetric polarization is evident in both the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. Recent work unveils a new dimension to this polarization story: newly elected Republican women are driving this polarization. Women are more likely to legislate on women’s issues than men, yet women’s shared interest in representing women doesn’t preclude their identity as partisans. In this article, we explore the effect of today’s political climate on state legislators’ policy representation of women’s issues. We ask what effect does gendered polarization have on women’s issues? To test this, we evaluate bill sponsorship in the states on the quintessential “women’s issue” of abortion. Our research design focuses on bill introductions and uses on an original dataset of pro- and anti-abortion rights bill introductions, which we analyze using an event count model. We find that overall polarization leads to the introduction of fewer restrictive abortion bills, but as polarization between women lawmakers grows, legislators are more likely to introduce anti-abortion rights legislation. Gender polarization has consequences on the types of bills legislators introduce and for how scholars should study polarization.

Salience, Scientific Uncertainty, and the Agenda‐Setting Power of Science

Discussions of science and its relevance to public policy have recently taken center stage in political discourse, illustrating the values‐based nature of scientific policy decisions. This article uses an original data set of media coverage to examine the ways in which salience and media portrayals of scientific uncertainty affect the agenda‐setting process for scientific policy issues. We build upon two scholarly literatures by incorporating research on the use of science in the policy process into the study of policy diffusion among the American states. In doing so, we develop a framework for how media portrayals of scientific information can affect agenda setting. We test this framework on three scientific issues: Genetically modified food labeling, human papillomavirus vaccinations, and indoor tanning. Our results indicate that lawmakers introduce more legislation on salient issues, while higher reported levels of scientific uncertainty reduce the likelihood of bill introductions. This finding illustrates the potential impact of national media coverage as an information transmission mechanism and the necessity of treating policy characteristics as subject to change over time.

Drinking the Tea: The Tea Party Movement and Legislative Agendas in the U.S. Senate

This article empirically investigates the impact of the Tea Party movement in the U.S. Congress by examining senatorial legislative agendas, including bill and resolution introductions and cosponsorships. Specifically, we test how senators responded to the Tea Party movement by increasing their attention to specific Tea Party issues. Our analysis accounts for state-level and electoral factors, including the level of grassroots Tea Party activity in a senator’s home state and the presence of a Tea Party primary challenger. Our findings indicate that the Tea Party led Republican senators to focus more on economically conservative issues in their legislative agendas, and that this impacted the Republican Conference as a whole. Our study of the Tea Party movement in the Senate highlights how national forces can shape legislative activity in Congress.

How Intense Policy Demanders Shape Postreform Politics: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act.

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been a politically volatile process. The ACA's institutional design and delayed feedback effects created a window of opportunity for its partisan opponents to launch challenges at both the federal and state level. Yet as recent research suggests, postreform politics depends on more than policy feedback alone; rather, it is shaped by the partisan and interest-group environment. We argue that "intense policy demanders" played an important role in defining the policy alternatives that comprised congressional Republicans' efforts to repeal and replace the ACA. To test this argument, we drew on an original data set of bill introductions in the House of Representatives between 2011 and 2016. Our analysis suggests that business contributions and political ideology affected the likelihood that House Republicans would introduce measures repealing significant portions of the ACA. A secondary analysis shows that intense policy demanders also shaped the vote on House Republicans' initial ACA replacement plan. These findings highlight the role intense policy demanders can play in shaping the postreform political agenda.

Lawmaker Age, Issue Salience, and Senior Representation in Congress

Political scientists have demonstrated the importance of lawmakers’ identities, showing that race, gender, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation affect legislative and representational behavior. Is the same true for age? We argue it is, but the effect is conditioned by the salience of different “senior issues.” Analyzing the bill introductions by members of Congress during the 109th and 110th Congresses, we show that older lawmakers are more likely to introduce legislation addressing lower salience senior issues than their younger colleagues. In contrast, sizeable senior constituencies in a district influence lawmaker attention to higher salience senior issues, regardless of a lawmaker’s age. These findings have implications for our understanding of senior power and personal roots of representation in the United States.

Policy Agendas and Economic Inequality in American Politics

This article investigates the relationship between economic inequality and US congressional agendas. Longstanding insights into the influence of political spending on public policy suggest that money can narrow the scope of policy conflicts. I argue that rising inequality should intensify these negative-agenda forces as wealthy interests gain a political advantage relative to other social groups and use this advantage to protect their socioeconomic position by donating to candidates who pursue less disruptive agendas. The expectation is that economic inequality narrows the purview of policymaking and that this is manifest through a reduction in the diversity of the congressional agenda. Empirical analysis supports this position. Error-correction models show that rising inequality is associated with a reduction in the diversity of congressional hearings, bill introductions, and laws. Moreover, it is legislators who are heavily dependent on deep-pocketed donors and political action committees that engage with a narrower range of policy topics.

Companion Bills and Cross-Chamber Collaboration in the U.S. Congress

The U.S. House and Senate were designed to have an adversarial relationship. Yet, House members and senators often collaborate on the introduction of “companion” bills. We develop a theory of these cross-chamber collaborations, which asserts that companion bill introductions are driven by legislators’ desire to increase the probability of bill passage and the relational difficulties in developing companion bill partnerships. To test the expectations emerging from our theory, we develop a novel data set of every companion bill introduction in the 111th and 112th U.S. Congress. Then, using social networking techniques, we develop an empirical model of partner selection in companion bill introduction. Our results are supportive of our expectations, and suggest that companion bills are more likely to survive chamber deliberation and are typically introduced by senior members with secure electoral margins.

When the Smoke Clears: Focusing Events, Issue Definition, Strategic Framing, and the Politics of Gun Control*

ObjectiveThis article explores the strategic nature of framing following a focusing event. We argue that focusing events serve as catalysts for bill introductions along three particular causal stories prevalent in gun control policy: restrictive, punitive, and lenient.MethodsWe employ a negative binomial regression model to investigate the effect firearm focusing events have on restrictive, lenient, and punitive bills introduced in both the House and the Senate.ResultsFocusing events lead to an increase in restrictive, punitive, and lenient bills introduced in the House. In the Senate, however, focusing events lead to an increase in the number of punitive and lenient bills, while having no significant impact on the number of restrictive bills.ConclusionThis represents an increase in attention to gun control policy regardless of the causal story.

Bureaucratic Noncompliance and Dynamic Lawmaking in the United States: The Case of the EPA

This paper raises a question that is little-discussed yet central to lawmaking and policy implementation in the American separation-of-powers system: Under what institutional conditions is Congress unable to induce compliance with legislative dictates in contemporary statutory implementation? Unlike a number of existing delegation models, the paper holds that variation in institutional conict and oversight of agencies fundamentally reshape agencies’ latitude as active policymakers. I answer this question in the context of the Environmental Protection Agency from 1973-2010 using an extensive original dataset on noncompliance using the hand-coding of several thousand congressional bill introductions and several hundred DC Circuit court cases. I use these data to test the separation-ofpowers theories concerning the eects of legislative-executive conict and legislative division

The Determinants of Policy Introduction and Bill Adoption: Examining Minimum Wage Increases in the American States, 1997–2006

Faced with long intervals between federal minimum wage increases in recent years, state legislatures are increasingly likely to take action. Motivated by the relative dearth of empirical work on minimum wages in the American states, this article considered various explanations to determine which factors are associated with legislative efforts to pass wage increases. Taking seriously the view that disagreements over the effects of minimum wage increases enhances the influence of political factors, we drew on the policy adoption and diffusion literature to examine how internal determinants (political and economic variables) and regional diffusion pressures relate to both the introduction and adoption of minimum wage legislation in the American states in the years between the last two federal minimum wage increases (1997–2006). Employing negative binomial regression to analyze annual bill introductions, we found that a number of political variables are related to the consideration of minimum wage increases. However, using event history analysis to examine annual adoptions of minimum wage increases, we found few of the same variables matter. We concluded with a discussion of the empirical results within the context of the broader policy literature and cautioned future scholars to consider seriously whether political factors exert distinct influences at different stages of the policy process.

Are Legislators More Productive When They Run for Higher Office?

Bill introductions are a key part of the representation process. Before a bill can be considered, a legislator must propose it. We gain insights into legislators’ behavior at the proposal stage by studying how running for higher office affects the bills that legislators introduce. After exploiting variation in West Virginia and the U.S. Congress to mitigate concerns about selection bias, we find that legislators seeking higher office propose more bills on a wider range of topics. Further, the bills that legislators propose line up with voters' interests; however issues important to underrepresented groups, such as the poor, do not receive the same level of attention. These results suggest that bias in the legislative agenda arises, at least in part, because of the issues that legislators omit to pursue. Our results also have implications for legislative institutional design and highlight the theoretically important difference between legislators' proactive and reactive behaviors.

Strange Bedfellows

This research examines the relationship between courts and legislatures in a comparative perspective. Specifically, I examine how (a) the ideological composition of the bench, (b) the propensity of court involvement in a given policy area, and (c) the disposition of court decisions in a given policy area influence the ideology of bill introductions and policy enactments by state legislatures. By examining HMO regulation and education policy in the American states during the 1990s, I find evidence that judicial influence does affect legislative policymaking, in both the introduction and enactment stages, across both policy areas. Although traditional scholarship has depicted the judicial branch as having minimal effect on policy formation, and subsequently social change, the findings of this study suggest that we have overlooked an important policymaking role of the judicial branch. Furthermore, state policy research has not given adequate attention to judicial influence as an explanation for policy formation in the American states.

Commentary on the 1991 Thomas and Welch Article “The Impact of Gender on Activities and Priorities of State Legislators”—

Legislative advocacy in the early to mid-1980s in the California statehouse was the genesis for our Western Political Quarterly article (Thomas and Welch 1991) on the impact of women in legislatures. On behalf of California NOW and CARAL (the California affiliate of NARAL), Sue Thomas lobbied the 120 legislators on women's issues. At the time, there were just 15 women in the statehouse, 12 in the assembly and 3 in the Senate. Thomas and her colleagues frequently conjectured that the work might proceed more smoothly were more women legislators.1 And so, moving on to graduate school, she asked Susan Welch to help her craft research that would take that hunch and turn it into systematic research. With support from the National Science Foundation and the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, we surveyed legislators in twelve states in 1988 to update decade-old or older research comparing women's and men's legislative activity levels and to extend that research to see if women made a difference in legislative policy. At the time, there had not been a lot of research on what women did they were elected to office, but what was available indicated that they were less active than men in a variety of legislative work, such as speaking in committees and on the floor, meeting with lobbyists (of particular interest given Sue's background), engaging in legislative bargaining, introducing bills, and passing legislation. In our work, we hypothesized that growing levels of experience and larger numbers of women would result in their increased confidence and participation. We also hypothesized that disparate, gender-based life experiences would result in greater sensitivity and commitment to issues that affect women in distinctive ways. In particular, we expected women's self-proclaimed legislative priorities to be somewhat different from men's priorities. Our hypotheses were confirmed. Women and men in our study were equally active on the range of legislative activities-a marked change from the 1970s. And women state legislators' lists of priority bills contained more legislation pertaining to women, children, and the family than men's lists. Critically, women were as successful as men in achieving passage of their priority bills. Thus, as hypothesized, electing women legislators did indeed appear to make a policy difference. In the years since the publication of our article, findings such as these became commonplace rather than headline grabbing. Indeed, the voluminous research published on questions related to political women and policy impact indicates that with few exceptions, from agenda creation through bill modification to policy outcomes, the presence of women has mattered. Legislative women have differed from men on bill introductions, cosponsorships, amendment activity in committees and floor sessions, floor speeches, roll call voting behavior, and policy outcomes. Looking back, embedded in the collective scholarship of the time was a certain kind of optimism not only about political outcomes but also about how political dynamics could or would change for the better with more women in office. The questions evolved from whether women mattered to how much and in how many ways. Many activists and scholars forecast that this would happen sooner rather than later. A recent column by Ellen Goodman (2007) notes that Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once predicted that women would achieve full legal equality by 1978. Yet time has a way of making our expectations look rosier-or at least less straightforward-than was probably warranted. In fact, instead of the proportions of women in state and federal office rapidly increasing, women's numbers in legislatures have not risen a great deal since 1988. At that time, women constituted 15.8 percent of state legislators across the nation and 5 percent of members of Congress. Now the percentages are 23.5 percent at the state and 16. …

Strange Bedfellows: The Policy Consequences of Legislative-Judicial Relations in the American States

This research examines the relationship between courts and legislatures in a comparative perspective. Specifically, I examine how 1) the ideological composition of the bench; 2) the propensity of court involvement in a given policy area; and 3) the disposition of court decisions in a given policy area influence the ideology of bill introductions and policy enactments by state legislatures. By examining HMO regulation and education policy in the American states during the 1990s, I find evidence that judicial influence does impact legislative policymaking, in both introduction and enactment stage, across both policy areas. While traditional scholarship has depicted the judicial branch as having minimal impact on policy formation, and subsequently social change, the findings of this study suggest that we have overlooked an important policymaking role of the judicial branch. Furthermore, state policy research has not given adequate attention to judicial influence as an explanation for policy formation in the American states.

The Policymaking Role of State Supreme Courts in Education Policy

In this article, I examine the relationship between courts and legislatures from a comparative perspective. Specifically, I discuss how (1) the ideological composition of the bench, (2) the propensity of court involvement in a given policy area, and (3) the presence of an advisory opinion affect the number of bill introductions and policy enactments by state legislatures. Examination of education policy in the American states reveals that ideologically distant courts limit the number of bill introductions and bill enactments in state legislatures. Alternatively, the presence of an advisory opinion increases policy introduction and enactment in state legislatures. A fundamental implication of these findings is that courts exert the greatest impact on policy during the introduction stage of the legislative process. Previous studies have not examined the introduction stage and have therefore marginalized the real impact of court influence on policy.

Cultural Politics: Legislating Morality in the States

We derive predictions from several social movement theories-grievance, resource mobilization, and political process-regarding social movement behavior with respect to bill introductions and bill progress in state legislatures. We test these predictions using an original dataset gathered in six states on legislation in issue areas important to the Christian Right. Results show some support for predictions generated by all three theories. In the introductions model, Christian Right strength in the Republican Party and Republican control of lawmaking in the state are positive predictors of the amount of socially conservative bill introductions. Liberal state ideologies are also, counter intuitively, associated with more conservative bill introductions. The dispositions model shows that liberal socio-moral bills are actually more likely to pass than conservative ones and that socio-moral bills (regardless of ideology) enjoy more legislative success in states with conservative political ideologies.

Congress, the President and Policymaking: A Historical Analysis, by Jean Reith Schroedel

The underlying theoretical premise of this text is that the separation between the executive and legislative functions has important policy consequences and has influenced legislative outcomes. The study analyzes the pattern of interaction on banking bill introductions over the past 150 years.

Movements and Gatekeepers: Congressional Response to Women's Movement Issues, 1900-1982

The relationship between social movements and Congress is a complex one which is not well understood. In this longitudinal study of congressional treatment of women's issues, we observe high levels of congressional action during periods when there is a mobilized women's movement compared with limited activity in non-movement periods. By contrasting bill introductions and the passage of laws, we attempt to specify Congress's role in responding to the presence of a social movement. We find little evidence that Congress systematically distorts the priorities of movements, but many indications that it controls the pace and timing of changes in policy.

The Assembly Line: Law Production in the American States

This study of legislative outputs in the fifty states examines bill introductions and bill enactments during the period from 1963 through 1974. Production rates are described in terms of the volume of bills introduced and laws made as well as the growth in legislation in recent years. Of principal concern is exploration of the role that institutional factors, such as the initiatives of individual legislators and the capacity of legislatures, play in promoting production. Analysis demonstrates the substantial impact of societal needs; thus population, urbanization, and industrialization are controlled, while the effects of individual initiatives and legislative capacity are tested. Analysis indicates that capacity plays a significant role and that societal and institutional factors combined explain a large percentage of the variation in bill introductions and enactments among the states.