We propose a method for tracking policy ideas in legislation. In the US Congress, only a very small proportion of bills become law. Surviving bills likely serve as vehicles for policy ideas originating in other bills, but there is currently no reliable way to learn when this occurs. Using the legislative history of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as our test bed, we investigate whether "text reuse" methods can help to shed additional light on policy development and lawmaking. In particular we ask whether lawmaking is more inclusive when judged in terms of the progress of ideas rather than the progress of bills.
In considering issue expertise in policymaking, we unpack differences in the supply and types of expertise with attention to the presumed privileged role of the bureaucracy. Our empirical investigation is based on witness testimonies of congressional hearings for a policy area involving various forms of expertise – critical infrastructure protection policymaking. Three sets of findings stand out. One set substantiates the role of the bureaucracy as an important information conduit while also showing it is not a primary source of issue expertise. A second set shows how differences in issue maturity and salience affect the demand for and supply of expertise. A third set illustrates the influence of a small cadre of hyper-expertise in drawing attention to problems and solutions across different venues. These findings challenge the conventional view of the bureaucracy in policymaking while expanding the understanding of different sources of information and types of issue expertise in policymaking.
Interactive visualizations are used widely in the natural sciences to facilitate discovery in "big-data" research. This article introduces a project that applies the same datadriven discovery approach to politics. Lawmaking is a complex process that can be difficult to convey in a constructive way, whether the audience is the general public, students, or researchers. Legislative Explorer (available at http://www.legex.org ) visualizes the progress of more than 250,000 congressional bills and resolutions introduced since 1973. Users of all abilities can engage with actual data to discover how bills become law. Filters designed by domain experts guide them toward key insights. It is our hope that Legislative Explorer promotes greater understanding of a much-maligned institution.A s information about the world around us becomes increasingly accessible through technology, researchers across disciplines are challenged to develop new methodologies for making sense of large and complex data sources. Data-driven visualizations comprise an especially important area of development in the natural sciences. Eff ective visualizations are thought to promote the discovery of empirical laws by facilitating "detection of constancies and trends in data" (Langley 1981 ).We propose that data-driven visualizations can be leveraged similarly to promote public understanding of political processes. They can enable a wide range of users to delve into large volumes of data without the usual prerequisite of advanced methodological training. Well-designed visualizations can lower the bar for discovery-not only for researchers but also for students and the general public-and promote greater interest and appreciation of the world in which we live.We begin by briefly describing the comparative advantages of visual approaches to discovery, especially for large, complex datasets. Next, we describe the particular challenge facing instructors who teach legislative process-a process that includes hundreds of actors, scores of institutions, and thousands of bills and resolutions that vary in importance and topic. We then introduce our effort to make this process more accessible through visualization-that is, Legislative Explorerand describe its potential for advancing instruction as well as research in political science.
In what ways do presidents engage in distributive politics? I study the effects of presidential electoral politics on the federal government's financial response to disasters. Specifically I ask whether swing states or safe states are more likely to receive additional disaster aid through presidentially ordered increases in the federal reimbursement rate for specific disasters. I examine four potential political factors affecting this distribution: swing states versus safe states, a president's base states versus the opposing party's base states, the presence of co-partisan presidents and governors, and the proximity of the next presidential election. I find that the effects vary by administration, with Bill Clinton not appearing to make partisan decisions in this way, while his successors include these factors when making the decisions. These findings demonstrate the presence of partisan political calculations in the distribution of disaster aid and also highlight differences in the ways power is handled in different presidential administrations.
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