Legislative Effectiveness in the American States

Abstract

We develop State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES) for state legislators across 97 legislative chambers over recent decades, based on the number of bills that they sponsor, how far those bills move through the lawmaking process, and their substantive importance. We assess the scores through criterion and construct validation and reveal new insights into effective lawmaking across legislators. We then offer two illustrations of the immense opportunities that these scores provide for new scholarship on legislative behavior. First, we demonstrate greater majority-party influence over lawmaking in states featuring ideological polarization and majority-party cohesion, and where there is greater electoral competition for chamber control. Second, we show how institutional design choices—from legislative rules to the scope of professionalization—affect the distributions of policymaking power from state to state.

Are Workers Effective Lawmakers?

“…There is an extensive literature that seeks to conceptualize, measure, and analyze legislative effectiveness in the US Congress and US state legislatures (Bucchianeri, Volden, and Wiseman 2024;Hitt, Volden, and Wiseman 2017;Matthews 1959;Stacy 2020;Wiseman 2014, 2018;Volden, Wiseman, and Wittmer 2013;Weissert 1991). Volden and Wiseman define legislative effectiveness as "the proven ability to advance a member's agenda items through the legislative process and into law" (Volden and Wiseman 2014, p. 18).…”

“…Volden and Wiseman define legislative effectiveness as "the proven ability to advance a member's agenda items through the legislative process and into law" (Volden and Wiseman 2014, p. 18). Bucchianeri, Volden, and Wiseman's (2024) SLES measure legislative action throughout the lawmaking process (sponsorship, action in committee, action beyond committee, a bill passing one chamber, and a bill becoming law). This measure comprehensively describes legislators' lawmaking efforts at each stage of the lawmaking process.…”

“…There is limited scholarship directly analyzing the relationship between legislators' social class backgrounds and their performance in legislatures. While no existing work uses legislative effectiveness scores (Bucchianeri, Volden, and Wiseman 2024;Volden and Wiseman 2014) to analyze how legislators' social class backgrounds are related to their legislative effectiveness, scholars have used other measures of legislative productivity. The findings are mixed among the existing literature but broadly suggest that working-class legislators are not uniformly less effective than white-collar legislators.…”

“…8 SLES are constructed similarly to legislative effective scores (LES) used to measure effectiveness in the US Congress (Volden and Wiseman 2014;Volden, Wiseman, and Wittmer 2013). SLES, like LES, captures the weighted average of a legislator's actions throughout five stages of the lawmaking process: bill introduction, action in committee (AIC), action beyond committee (ABC), passing one chamber (PASS), and becoming law (LAW) (Bucchianeri, Volden, and Wiseman 2024). Therefore, these scores evaluate effectiveness throughout the entirety of the legislative process rather than simply analyzing roll-call votes.…”

“…My data set pairs pre-legislature occupational data for more than 14,000 unique state legislators (Makse 2019) with Bucchianeri, Volden, and Wiseman's (2024) state legislative effectiveness scores (SLES). The data set in total includes more than 50,000 legislator-term specific observations from 49 states for more than 30 years .…”