Bill Sponsorship Research Articles

Crediting Invisible Work: Congress and the Lawmaking Productivity Metric (LawProM)

Congressional observers have long been interested in the distinction between legislative “workhorses” and “showhorses.” 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 for House Members of the 101–113th Congresses. Including methods of lawmaking beyond bill sponsorship provides important insights about who the congressional workhorses are. In particular, we find that traditional measures systematically undercount the legislative successes of women and likely Black Members of Congress because they disproportionately legislate in less visible ways.

A Right Restricted: Racial Threat and the Sponsorship of Restrictive Voting Laws

AbstractIn the aftermath of the United States’ 2020 presidential election, state legislatures have introduced and passed an unprecedented number of restrictive voting bills. While past research has looked at the state-level drivers of restrictive voting legislation, this project explores what factors predict which legislators within states push for these laws. Specifically, I ask whether district-level characteristics predict when lawmakers use bill sponsorship to send messages about their positions beyond those sent by simple roll-call votes. I use theories of geographical threat and racial resentment to predict where sponsorship of these bills is most likely. My results tie these theoretical expectations to observed legislative activity: the whitest state legislative districts in the least-white states were the most likely to be represented by lawmakers who sponsored restrictive bills, as were districts with the most racially resentful white residents. I conclude that, despite lawmakers justifying these restrictive laws by claiming that fraud is a major problem, race and racism are inherently tied to the introduction and passage of these bills. This raises important questions about commitments to multiracial democracy.

Take (Her) to the Limit: Term Limits do Not Diminish Women's Overperformance in Legislative Office

Women in political office outperform men in legislative activity and constituent services. Scholars have identified two potential explanations for this overperformance: women are higher quality candidates when they run for office and women face elevated voter expectations to win elections. We use the presence of term limits to examine how these two justifications for women's overperformance produce downstream effects. While designed to strike a blow to entrenched systems of power, term limits reduce the time that legislators spend on constituent service and legislative output, including bill sponsorship, votes, and committee work. We use the effects of term limits as a tool for understanding the two paths to women's overperformance, using data on over 6000 legislators serving in term‐limited states. We find more evidence for the quality candidate hypothesis than the voter expectations hypothesis. While term limits degrade men's performance in office, women officeholders continue to overperform even under this institutional constraint. Our findings that women's overperformance is more likely due to their higher quality have implications for efforts to increase the representativeness of political bodies, the quality of representation in state legislatures, and the gendered consequences of institutional reforms.

Más allá del género. ¿Por qué las diputadas mexicanas representan sustantivamente a las mujeres?

Objective/Context: The primary purpose of this research is to identify and measure the influence of different institutional, partisan, and biographic variables on the substantive representation of women in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. Most current studies on the subject assent that the presence of more female legislators in congresses is a relevant precondition for an effective promotion of women’s interests. Nevertheless, still little is known about how other variables affect congresswomen’s intention to promote female-oriented bills. Methodology: Through interviews with former female legislators recognized for their activism in the interest of women, and using statistical models, the article seeks to explain the elements that may influence the substantive representation of Mexican women through bill sponsorship. Conclusions: Proportional representation, the adscription to leftist or minority parties, and legislative, partisan, and civic experiences can increase the propensity of female legislators to press for policy changes in support for women’s demands. On the contrary, one of the main limitations for women’s substantive representation in congress is the accumulation of party leaderships (mostly male) in the principal legislative positions and resolutions. Originality: With an original dataset and specifically designed interviews for this study, the research contributes to representation theory by suggesting that, along with the presence of more female legislators, other structural and institutional conditions need to be met for a congress to process the most relevant demands coming from women in a political community.

Everything Old Is New Again: The Persistence of Republican Opposition to Multilateralism in American Foreign Policy

AbstractThe last two Republican presidents’ hostility to multilateralism has produced striking departures from postwar American foreign policy, but this position is not as new as it sometimes appears. It has deep historical roots in the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Using data on congressional voting and bill sponsorship, we show that Republicans, especially those from the party's conservative wing, have tended to oppose multilateral rules for more than a century. This position fit logically into the broader foreign policy that Republican presidents developed before World War I but posed problems in light of the changing conditions during the mid-twentieth century. The importance of multilateral cooperation for U.S. national security during the Cold War and the growing international competitiveness of American manufacturing split the party on multilateral rules, but it did not reverse the conservative wing's longstanding skepticism of them. Congressional leaders’ efforts to keep consequential choices about multilateral rules off the legislative agenda for most of the postwar era contributed to the persistence of this position. This move spared conservative members of Congress from confronting the costs of opposing multilateral institutions, giving them little incentive to challenge ideological orthodoxy.

Femisocial capital: Homophily and bill sponsorship by South Korean female legislators

This article is about femisocial capital: a type of gendered political capital tended towards facilitating greater intra-female collaboration. Unlike its similar conceptual counterpart of homosocial capital that typically reinforces male dominance in politics, femisocial capital, at least within the scope of legislative activity, highlights a positive function of gender and politics. By examining the bill sponsorship networks of multi-term female legislators in South Korea, this article finds that the institutional legacy of the progressive party in South Korea and its female lawmakers sharing associational membership in feminist organizations (hence, the prefix ‘femi’), enables such gendered political capital to function in their favor. In contrast to research agendas that seek to find gender working in explicit ways (i.e., whether more women in office leads to greater empowerment for women in politics), this article shows that while gender does matter, it may matter in much more discreet and less obvious ways.

Overpromising Social Welfare Benefits? Electoral Competition and Welfare Politics in Taiwan

AbstractDrawing insights from legislative, electoral and welfare studies, the article investigates whether and to what extent electoral competition affects incumbent politicians’ overpromising of social welfare benefits. For this, Taiwan is chosen as the case and the article examines the fate of elite-level social welfare legislative proposals in the period between 1992 and 2016. Findings drawn from quantitative bill sponsorship patterns demonstrate that political elites tend to propose failure-prone social welfare bills during election periods. Moreover, this tendency grew even more clearly in tandem with the rising levels of electoral democracy. The article argues that the overpromising of social welfare benefits is likely due to cognitive biases on the voter side allowing politicians to make promises without necessarily facing the negative consequences of under-delivery. The article contributes to the comparative welfare state literature by adding much-needed nuance to the existing debates on the relationship between democratic deepening, electoral competition, and the development of welfare politics.

State Policy and National Representation: Marijuana Politics in American Federalism

Members of Congress represent geographically demarcated districts embedded in subnational policy environments. Drawing on policy feedback literature and literature on congressional representation, I argue that, because of this institutional configuration, subnational policy adoption can affect national representation. More specifically, policy reforms in the states they represent can increase pressures members face from organized groups and individuals in their constituencies to promote aligned federal policies. Empirically, I examine the effects of state marijuana legalization. The inferential design leverages differences across the states in statewide citizen initiative institutions, which provides exogenous variation in legalization. Instrumental variables analysis indicates legalization influenced pro‐marijuana bill sponsorship and roll calls in the 116th Congress. The evidence points to growing influence of industry in legalizing states—including the ability to mobilize employees and customers—as the key mechanism, thus underscoring the importance of a political economy perspective for studying interdependencies in American federalism.

Immigrants, Intersectionality and the Politics of Substantive Representation

ABSTRACT In this paper, we develop a theory of intersectional substantive representation of and by immigrant communities grounded in two concepts: representational orientation to constituents and representational activity to achieve goals. We argue that Asian American women and Latinas are more likely than Latinos and Asian American men to hold an “embedded” orientation to politics, and view community networks and ties as deeply intertwined with the way they frame their identities and goals as representatives. We test our theoretical expectations regarding formal legislative processes by analyzing bill sponsorship by Asian American and Latina/o Democrats serving in state legislatures from 2014–2017, and draw on a set of interviews with Latina/o and Asian American legislators to argue that our findings account for a wider range of experiences related to overlapping group identities than previous scholarship focused on race and gender alone.

Decomposing the source of the gender gap in legislative committee service: evidence from US states

AbstractExtensive research on gender and politics indicates that women legislators are more likely to serve on committees and sponsor bills related to so-called “women's issues.” However, it remains unclear whether this empirical regularity is driven by district preferences, differences in legislator backgrounds, or because gendered political processes shape and constrain the choices available to women once they are elected. We introduce expansive new data on over 25,000 US state legislators and an empirical strategy to causally isolate the different channels that might explain these gendered differences in legislator behavior. After accounting for district preferences with a difference-in-differences design and for candidate backgrounds via campaign fundraising data, we find that women are still more likely to serve on women's issues committees, although the gender gap in bill sponsorship decreases. These results shed new light on the mechanisms that lead men and women to focus on different policy areas as legislators.

Reevaluating the Substantive Representation of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Americans: A Multiverse Analysis

Social scientists are facing a crisis of confidence in quantitative results. Multiverse analysis provides concerned scholars a tool for verifying the robustness of findings. This article introduces political scientists to multiverse analysis through an application. It identifies how differing approaches to data processing led to divergent conclusions about the representation of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) Americans in Congress in a 2015 Journal of Politics article. The analysis casts doubt on the original conclusion that the size of the LGB population in a district is significantly associated with the bill sponsorship activity of its representative. More broadly, it demonstrates how researchers can keep a running tally of data-processing decisions and parsimoniously present the consequences of those decisions for the findings. Multiverse analysis can help scholars publish replicable results in original work as well as replicate and extend previously published work.

Considering subnational support of climate change policy in the United States and the implications of symbolic policy acts

ABSTRACT While existing literature points to a number of factors that shape subnational support for climate policy, the extant scholarship has struggled to illustrate a clear and convincing explanation for subnational support of climate policy efforts and whether that support is meaningful. By looking to the United States, where subnational actors have an important role in environmental policy development and implementation, we find that legislators’ ideology and membership in the minority party determines sponsorship of climate bills. Specifically, liberal legislators with the fewest opportunities to signal efficacy to their constituents are the most likely to support subnational climate change policy efforts. Given that the individuals most likely to support climate policy efforts are those without capacity, many support efforts may be more symbolic than substantive.

From rhetoric to record: linking tweets to legislative agendas in congress

ABSTRACT Social media incentivizes members of Congress to routinely advertise their policy agenda for the public; however, it is unclear whether those expressed policy priorities are linked to their legislative behaviour. The incongruous nature of unlimited, online messages with constrained policy agendas necessitates assessing the association between what politicians say and their institutional actions. Using a dataset of senators’ tweets from the 114th Congress, we analyse policy rhetoric on Twitter and bill sponsorship across a variety of issues in the Senate to show that senators’ policy priorities on Twitter are representative of congressional activity. These results broaden the application of social media as a tool for policy agendas – extending theories of limited attention to lawmakers’ political communication.

METHODS USED BY WOMEN PARLIAMENTARIANS TO INFLUENCE LEGISLATIVE PROCESSES AND OUTCOMES IN KENYA’S NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF THE 11TH PARLIAMENT (2013 -2017)

Purpose: The study examined the legislative influence of women in the context of gender quotas in Kenya’s National Assembly of the 11th parliament (2013-207). This article focuses on the methods women parliamentarians used to assert legislative influence.
 Methodology: This was a descriptive case study which focused on all 68 women in the National Assembly. Respondents were identified through stratified sampling based on: pathway to parliament; membership and leadership of parliamentary structures; contribution to debate; and sponsorship of Bills enacted. A total of 11 women were interviewed, derived from four of the seven parliamentary political parties, specifically the two largest political coalitions which contributed 94% of the legislature. The study also interviewed four purposively sampled key informants (KIs) - three male and one female. The data was processed manually, analysed and presented under each study objective. Sources of primary data were coded as follows: WL (Woman Legislator), ML (Male Legislator) and KI (Key Informant). All respondents were allocated specific numbers for identification and acknowledgement. 
 Findings: The study established that women legislators used the following methods to influence legislation: mobilisation of male colleagues; solidarity across political parties; activism; leveraging committee positions; reliance on the National Assembly leadership; and compromise and conciliation. It notes that the methods were effective in some circumstances but failed in others.
 Unique contribution to theory, practice and policy: The study outlines how various methods were applied by women legislators in Kenya’s National Assembly 2013-2017, the first time quotas were applied in Kenyan elections. It fills the gap in earlier studies that did not document these methods. The study notes that the methods were not intrinsically weak but their effectiveness was limited by circumstances, especially the attitude of male legislators. It illustrates the importance of diversifying approaches to influence legislation. The study recommends that women legislators should: work with supportive male legislators and other pressure groups in the legislature; introduce Bills early in the legislative calendar to improve chances of success; receive training on parliamentary work; and occupy influential parliamentary leadership positions.

Backbone: An R package for extracting the backbone of bipartite projections.

Bipartite projections are used in a wide range of network contexts including politics (bill co-sponsorship), genetics (gene co-expression), economics (executive board co-membership), and innovation (patent co-authorship). However, because bipartite projections are always weighted graphs, which are inherently challenging to analyze and visualize, it is often useful to examine the 'backbone,' an unweighted subgraph containing only the most significant edges. In this paper, we introduce the R package backbone for extracting the backbone of weighted bipartite projections, and use bill sponsorship data from the 114th session of the United States Senate to demonstrate its functionality.

Incorporation is Not Enough: The Agenda Influence of Black Lawmakers in Congressional Committees

AbstractTraditionally, scholars argue that the committee structure is central to the policymaking process in congress, and that those that wield the gavel in committees enjoy a great deal of influence over the legislative agenda. The most recent iterations of Congress are more diverse than ever before. With 55 members—of whom, five chair full committees and 28 sit atop subcommittees—the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is in a place to wield a significant leverage over the legislative agenda in the 116th Congress. However, noticeable proportional gains in minority membership in Congress have yet to produce sizable policy gains for the communities they represent. An examination of bill sponsorship from the 103rd–112th congresses reveals underlying institutional forces—i.e., marginalization and negative agenda setting—leave Black lawmakers at a distinct disadvantage compared to their non-black counterparts. Bills in policy areas targeted by the CBC are subject to disproportionate winnowing in congressional committees. Unfortunately, a number of institutional resources often found to increase a bill's prospects—including placements and leadership on committees with jurisdiction over policy areas of interest—are relatively ineffective for CBC members looking to forward those key issues onto the legislative agenda.

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.

What motivates a legislator to sponsor a bill that will never become law? The case of members of the Chilean Chamber of Deputies, 1990–2014

ABSTRACT In countries where legislators can sponsor bills, but these bills have few chances of promulgation, motives other than seeing a bill become law must also account for bill sponsorship. After discussing the theoretical determinants of bill sponsorship, we propose five hypotheses that account for a legislator’s bill sponsorship. We test these hypotheses for the case of Chile’s presidential system, where only 8.6% of legislative bills were promulgated as laws between 1990 and 2014. We use data for 4602 bills presented by the 728 members of the Chamber of Deputies during those six legislative terms, totalling 30,986 individual sponsorships. Deputies with discrete career ambitions sponsor fewer bills than legislators with progressive or static ambitions. Legislators with a longer tenure sponsor fewer bill. Opposition legislators do not sponsor more bills than government legislators. Legislators sponsor fewer bills in the first and last years of every term. As they have few chances of seeing their bills become laws, Chilean legislators use bills as a tool to advance their political careers and do so responding to the incentives of the electoral cycle.

Women in the Majority: Critical Mass and the New Hampshire Senate

ABSTRACT In 2009, the New Hampshire Senate became the first chamber in the United States where a majority of the legislators were women. In this article, we test whether a female majority changed the agenda content and behavior of legislators in the 2009–2010 session. We compare bill sponsorship and co-sponsorship in the majority woman session to three other sessions of the chamber. We find that the content of the legislative agenda did not change significantly under a female majority; however, women legislators did co-sponsor each other’s bills more often in the majority women session. Our results suggest that partisanship rather than gender drives legislators’ behavior under a female majority.

Climate Change Policymaking in the States: A View at 2020

Abstract Climate change policymaking has stalled at the federal level in the United States, especially since Donald Trump’s election as president. Concurrently, extreme weather, rising sea levels, and other climatic effects have increased the salience of climate change in the mass public and among elected officials. In response, legislators in state governments increasingly introduce and adopt policies associated with climate change. In this article, we evaluate the state of climate change policymaking in state legislatures, with a focus on overall trends in climate mitigation and adaptation innovation and cases of policy retrenchment. We document an increased level of climate legislation introduced in U.S. states since President Trump’s election, particularly in states under Democratic Party control. We evaluate patterns of introduced legislation across the states between 2011 and 2019 and consider the factors associated with bill sponsorship. Our results demonstrate the increased partisan nature of climate change policymaking in U.S. states.