Policy Agendas, Effective Lawmaking, and Women’s Issues in State Legislatures
Tuesday, August 4, 2026
State legislatures introduce roughly 100,000 bills a year, far outpacing Congress, yet scholars have long lacked a reliable way to sort that volume into policy areas, making it hard to ask basic questions about which issues get attention, which stall, and who succeeds where. In this Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) working paper, the authors take on that challenge directly. It was written by Andrew M.O. Ballard, Associate Professor at Florida State University (and CEL Faculty Affiliate), Mackenzie R. Dobson, Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (and CEL Faculty Affiliate), Martín Gandur, Assistant Professor at Texas Christian University, CEL Co-Director Craig Volden, Professor at UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, and CEL Co-Director Alan E. Wiseman, Associate Provost and Professor at Vanderbilt University.
Using a transformer-based classification model trained on nearly 5,000 hand-coded bills, the authors sort more than 1.6 million state bills introduced between 2009 and 2019 across 48 states into 18 policy areas, achieving an out-of-sample F1 score of 0.90. Pairing this classification with existing data on bill sponsorship and progression, they introduce Issue-Specific State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (ISLES), allowing them to ask, for the first time at this scale, when, where, and among whom lawmaking success happens.
The paper’s central case study examines “women’s issues” in the states. The authors find that women legislators sponsor significantly more bills than men in Civil Rights, Education, Health, and Welfare, but that bills in these areas are more likely to stall than bills in other policy areas. That gridlock, however, isn’t fixed: as the proportion of women in a chamber approaches parity, the passage gap between women’s issue bills and other bills narrows and eventually disappears, driven in part by women’s own bills advancing at higher rates in those more balanced settings.
Read the full paper here.
“The Idaho State Capitol in Boise” by Miguel Acosta is licensed under the Pexels License.
