Measuring Legislative Accomplishment, 1877-1994

Understanding the dynamics of lawmaking in the United States is at the center of the study of American politics. A fundamental obstacle to progress in this pursuit is the lack of measures of policy output, especially for the period prior to 1946. The lack of direct legislative accomplishment measure...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:American journal of political science 2006-01, Vol.50 (1), p.232-249
Main Authors: Clinton, Joshua D., Lapinski, John S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
American history
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Congressional legislation
Dynamics
Estimation methods
Government policy
Items (Measures)
Landmarks
Legislation
Measurement
Measures (Instruments)
Methodology (Data Analysis)
Policy Making
Political science
Political Science Research
Political systems
Politics
Presidency
Statutes
Statutory law
U.S.A
Voting rights
Workshops
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Understanding the dynamics of lawmaking in the United States is at the center of the study of American politics. A fundamental obstacle to progress in this pursuit is the lack of measures of policy output, especially for the period prior to 1946. The lack of direct legislative accomplishment measures makes it difficult to assess the performance of our political system. We provide a new measure of legislative significance and accomplishment. Specifically, we demonstrate how item-response theory can he combined with a new dataset that contains every public statute enacted between 1877 and 1994 to estimate "legislative importance" across time. Although the resulting estimates and associated standard errors provide new opportunities for scholars interested in analyzing U.S. policymaking since 1877, the methodology we present is not restricted to Congress, the United States, or lawmaking.
ISSN:0092-5853
1540-5907
DOI:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006.00181.x