The broad goals of this project are to determine whose ideas and proposals prevail in Congress. Legislative scholars have traditionally studied important subjects such as legislative effectiveness and agenda control by studying the progress of bills. In chapter 7 of Congress and the Politics of Problem Solving, Wilkerson and Adler show that using bills for these purposes has important limitations. Bills are “vehicles” for policy ideas. Often the successful sponsor of a bill that becomes law is a committee or subcommittee chair who claims the credit for a collective policy development process involving “must pass” legislation such as a program reauthorization or a law passed in response to a salient external event.

Tracing Policy Ideas: the Affordable Care Act

In the 111th Congress, HR 3590 as introduced was titled the Service Members Home Ownership TAX Act of 2009. As enacted, HR 3590 was titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare. The legislative history of HR 3590 is unusual but by no means unique. It illustrates a widely appreciated but rarely studied point: bills evolve as they move through the legislative process. They pick up and shed policy provisions that can range from relatively small adjustments in language to complete bills (in the case of omnibus legislation).

The figure above illustrates a new text-based approach to systematically tracing the progress of policy ideas or provisions (as opposed to bills) in legislation. We use text reuse methods from computer science (think plagiarism detection) to trace similar language wherever it appears in legislation. Figure 1 is based on a comparison of section texts in introduced bills in the 111thCongress to section texts found in the enacted version of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  A substantial number of ACA sections match sections in bills sponsored by other lawmakers (of both parties). One of these bills (HR 3692) became law after the ACA’s enactment, but apparently not before some of its original provisions found their way into the ACA.

Abstract: Scholars agree that religion influences how people think and act politically. Both pundits and political scientists write about “values voters”-people who vote based on the values they derive from their religion. Based on contemporary American politics, then, one might assume that religion shapes public opinion. Smith argues that such a statement is true in the short run but not the long run. In a pluralistic religious environment like the United States, churches and denominations cannot stray far politically from what their members will accept. During periods of cultural transition, Christian leaders often resist emerging values and behaviors, but they give up the fight and reinterpret the Bible as the pressure intensifies. As a result, in the long run religion is primarily a reactive force in American politics.

Abstract: Westminster systems feature a strong government and a weak opposition, but the origins of this arrangement–the tacit acquiesence to reduced minority rights by non-government parties in the late 19th Century House of Commons–present a profound puzzle to researchers. We argue that oppositions voluntarily surrendered initiation and amendment rights, making parliamentary business more efficient for governments, in exchange for more certain opportunities to hold cabinet ministers to account. We gather a new data set comprising half-a-million parliamentary speeches and biographical information on over 8000 MPs to investigate our claims. We estimate the parameters of a novel Markov-chain model of parliamentary discourse to measure ministerial `responsiveness’ over time, and present findings supporting our case. In particular, we show that the period 1880­-1902 (culminating in Balfour’s `railway timetable’) was critical for the emergence of this characteristically adversarial part of the Westminster System.

In the article they argue that homeland security provides a preeminent example of the challenges of developing policy regimes that focus policymaking on a common goal across diverse subsystems. All the ingredients for fashioning a powerful regime were in place after the terrorist attacks of September 2001—a common purpose, engaged stakeholders, and institutional redesign. But for a variety of reasons,  the results are far from cohesive. The lessons they draw are more general ones regarding factors that influence the strength of boundary-spanning policy regimes.

“Constructing Homeland Security:  An Anemic Regime,” Policy Studies Journal 39(2) 285-307.

An interview about the book can be found here

In keeping with the latest trends, they also have a blog.