Papers

Policy Interest and Legislative Responsiveness: Bill Introductions as Indicators of Issue Salience

We also study bill introductions, but from a different perspective. We assume that legislators introduce bills to signal their interest in public policy issues, and that their collective behavior has consequences for Congress' policy agenda. If our assumption is correct, introduced bills can be used to study a wide range of agenda-setting questions. Policy scholars know that changes in policy demand or need do not necessarily result in policy change (Kingdon 1984). Our dataset provides new opportunities to study the agenda setting process systematically by portraying the policy process as a filtering process from introduced bills, to hearings, to statutes (as well as intermediate stages). While committee scholars have studied questions of committee power by studying what committees do, our dataset will allow us to study what committees do not do, perhaps the most important source of committee power. While committee scholars study jurisdictional questions by comparing the subjects of the hearings committees hold, we can study jurisdictional questions by investigating where particular kinds of bills are referred, and how these referral evolve over time. While public policy scholars emphasize the disjointed nature of the policymaking process, our dataset has the potential to enable us to study the policymaking process systematically and quantitatively to better understand why Congress sometimes attends to issues and at other times does not.

In this paper, we present some initial findings for our study of introduced bills in two Congresses. We have coded the policy topics of all bills introduced between 1987-1990 (more than 20,000) to be consistent with the policy content codes of Baumgartner and Jones' Agendas and Public Policy Project. Our use of the same coding system makes it possible to compare policy related activity across several venues, from NYT Stories, to introduced bills, to congressional hearings, to statutes. In addition, our bills dataset includes detailed information about the progress of individual bills, so the we can trace how far a bill progress in the process if it receives a hearing but does not become law. This paper focuses on the 6195 bills introduced in the Senate, and is short on analysis because we have just completed the data collection. Nonetheless, we find support for our initial expectation that an increase in bill introductions in a policy area will lead to an increase in hearings in that policy area.