Pivots or Partisans? Proposal-Making Strategy and Status Quo Selection in Congress (Published Paper)

Thursday, May 15

Lawmakers vary considerably in how effectively they advance their priorities through Congress. However, the actual proposal-writing strategies undergirding these differences have remained largely unexplored, due to measurement and methodological difficulties. These obstacles have included prohibitively small sample sizes, costly data requirements, and strong theoretical assumptions. In this published paper in Quarterly Journal of Political Science and based on a Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) working paper, Associate Professor Jesse Crosson of Purdue University (and CEL Faculty Affiliate), Research Assistant Professor Alexander Furnas of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Assistant Professor Geoffrey Lorenz of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (also a CEL Faculty Affiliate) address these obstacles and analyze the proposal strategies of effective lawmakers directly, using original measures of the spatial locations of congressional bill proposals and associated status quos generated by jointly scaling cosponsorship, roll-call, and interest group position-taking data for 1,007 bills from the 110th through 114th Congresses. Because interest groups take positions on bills before they receive votes, the measures in this paper cover many bills that die in committee, permitting comparisons between successful and unsuccessful bills. The authors demonstrate that legislative advancement favors moderate proposals over partisan ones, and that effective lawmakers are those who make proposals closer to the median even at the expense of their preferred policy.

To learn more, read the full paper here.