Legislative Research – Center for Effective Lawmaking

2023-2024 Small Grant Awards Announced

2023-2024 Small Grant Awards Announced The Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) is proud to present its 6th annual small grant awards and recipients. The awards are given to distinguished individuals who are researching topics which connect to the mission of the CEL to advance the generation, communication, and use of new knowledge about the effectiveness of individual lawmakers and legislative institutions. This group will join previous grant recipients who have made insightful contributions to the field and broadened the discussions around the topics within it. We are honored to support…

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November 15, 2023

I’m Coming Out! How Voter Discrimination Produces Effective LGBTQ Lawmakers

I’m Coming Out! How Voter Discrimination Produces Effective LGBTQ Lawmakers In this Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) working paper, the University of Virginia's Jacob Lollis and Mackenzie Dobson (CEL Graduate Affiliate) look into the effectiveness of LGBTQ lawmakers. The authors expand on earlier research that connects voter discrimination to effective lawmaking and argue that the prejudice that LGBTQ legislators face from voters enables them to be effective lawmakers. To test this, Lollis and Dobson take data on state legislators’ sexual identity and compare it to data on state legislative effectiveness…

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October 31, 2023

About the CEL / Center Affiliates / Faculty Affiliates

Meet our Faculty Affiliate: Andrew Pennock

Meet our Faculty Affiliate: Andrew Pennock The Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) is excited to introduce one of our newest faculty affiliates, Andrew Pennock. Currently, he serves as an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia (UVA). While at UVA, Professor Pennock has leveraged his relationship with Virginia state legislators to establish Batten as an influential force for policy development in the state. He serves in a number of capacities at UVA including as an elected member…

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October 27, 2023

About the CEL / Center Affiliates

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

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

Legislative Anaylsis / Legislative Research

Just How Unorthodox? Assessing Lawmaking on Omnibus Spending Bills

Just How Unorthodox? Assessing Lawmaking on Omnibus Spending Bills Scholars commonly observe that lawmaking in Congress has transitioned from the textbook system of “regular order” in which power was decentralized in committees and lawmaking followed a formal process to one of “unorthodox lawmaking” characterized by the centralization of power in party leaders and a lack of formal process. It is debated whether this change marks a decline in Congress’s lawmaking capacity, or is a procedural adaptation that has allowed Congress to remain productive despite high levels of partisanship. In this…

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June 21, 2023

University of Virginia+Vanderbilt University

University of Virginia
+
Vanderbilt University