Blog – Page 6 – Center for Effective Lawmaking

Meet our Research Affiliates: Fred Gui and Arjun Vishwanath

Meet our Research Affiliates: Fred Gui and Arjun Vishwanath The Center for Effective Lawmaking is happy to introduce Fred Gui and Arjun Vishwanath as two of our newest postdoctoral research affiliates.Fred Gui is a postdoctoral research associate at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. His research interests include American political institutions, interest groups, state and local politics, and racial and ethnic politics. His most recent project examines the impact of having racial diverse staffers on the corresponding legislators' choices to sponsor and…

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October 12, 2023

About the CEL / Faculty Affiliates

Meet our Faculty Affiliate: Ju Yeon (Julia) Park

Meet our Faculty Affiliate: Ju Yeon (Julia) Park The Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) is excited to introduce Ju Yeon (Julia) Park as one of our newest Faculty Affiliates. Professor Park is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University. Previously, she has served as an Assistant Professor of Government at the University of Essex in Colchester, UK, and received her doctoral degree in Politics from New York University in New York, NY. Professor Park has also completed postdoctoral research at both the University…

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October 10, 2023

About the CEL / Faculty Affiliates

Meet our Faculty Affiliate: Christian Fong

Meet our Faculty Affiliate: Christian Fong The Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) is happy to announce one of our newest Faculty Affiliates, Christian Fong. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, teaching classes at both the undergraduate and PhD level. Previously, as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, Professor Fong served as an economic policy advisor to Senator Mike Lee. In addition, he spent three years as a Graduate Research Fellow for the National Science Foundation and completed a PhD in Political Economics at the…

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October 9, 2023

Legislative Anaylsis / Legislative Research

Pivots or Partisans?: Proposal-Making Strategy and Status Quo Selection in Congress

Pivots or Partisans? Proposal-Making Strategy and Status Quo Selection in Congress 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 Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) working paper, political scientists Jesse Crosson (CEL Faculty Affiliate), Alexander Furnas, and Geoffrey Lorenz (CEL Faculty Affiliate) address these obstacles and analyze the proposal strategies of effective…

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September 27, 2023

Events

CEL Briefing with the Congress’s “Problem Solvers”

CEL Briefing with the Congress’s “Problem Solvers” The co-directors of the Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL), Professors Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman (of the University of Virginia Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, and Vanderbilt University Department of Political Science, respectively), visited the U.S. Capitol Building this week to conduct a briefing with the legislative staff of members of the congressional Problem Solvers Caucus. The caucus defines itself as “a bipartisan group of Members of Congress organized to get to ‘yes’ to help solve some of our country’s…

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September 22, 2023

Conversations with Lawmakers

Discussing Legislative Effectiveness with Representative Gerry Connolly

Discussing Legislative Effectiveness with Representative Gerry Connolly Representative Gerry Connolly has served as the U.S. representative for Virginia's 11th congressional district since 2009. Representative Connolly has been identified by the Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) as being the most effective Democratic lawmaker in the U.S. House during the 117th Congress, as well as the most effective Democratic House Member in the area of government operations. He was also cited as having one of the longest streaks of “Exceeding Expectations” among all House members.CEL Co-Directors Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman recently…

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September 19, 2023

Legislative Research

Call for 2023-2024 Small Grant Awards

Call for 2023-2024 Small Grant Awards Proposal deadline: September 30, 2023Awards announced by: October 31, 2023The Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) welcomes applications for grants to fund research consistent with the mission of the Center. The Center advances the generation, communication, and use of new knowledge about the effectiveness of individual lawmakers and U.S. legislative institutions. See our website (www.thelawmakers.org) for more on the CEL.The research receiving support must focus on effective lawmaking and must be designed to make an original scholarly contribution, generating and communicating new knowledge. Grants typically…

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August 25, 2023

Events

A Visit from Tsinghua University

A Visit from Tsinghua University On August 7, the Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) hosted a group of students from China's Tsinghua University who had come to the University of Virginia (UVA) as part of a two-week visit to the United States. The students were members of Youth Voices, a delegation from Tsinghua's Center for Global Competence Development (CGCD) which is dedicated to providing guidance, support and resources on global competence development, and to promoting its integration into the university-wide student cultivation process. Invited to the United States on behalf…

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August 8, 2023

Legislative Anaylsis / Legislative Research

How Modern Lawmakers Advertise Their Legislative Effectiveness to Constituents

How Modern Lawmakers Advertise Their Legislative Effectiveness to Constituents In a complex information environment, members of Congress must communicate to their constituents their value as a representative. Specifically, they aim to convince voters that they are effective representatives and therefore ought to be reelected. Modern scholarship has focused largely on legislators’ effectiveness as lawmakers in areas like bill introduction, sponsorship, and shepherding of legislation through congressional procedures. But legislators do more than traditional lawmaking activities; they also engage in representational acts of advocacy and district-focused activity. This expanded notion of…

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August 7, 2023

Legislative Anaylsis / Legislative Research

Expertise Acquisition in Congress

Expertise Acquisition in Congress Staff members are an essential part of a well-functioning Congress, as is the expertise they acquire and use to do their jobs. It is therefore important to understand what factors contribute to or detract from staff investing in acquiring expertise and learning new skills. To examine these ideas, Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) Faculty Affiliate Christian Fong and his co-authors Kenneth Lowande and Adam Rauh – all of the University of Michigan – advance a theory of skill acquisition, rooted in the field of labor economics, and apply it to the problem of congressional oversight of the executive branch.…

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July 25, 2023