The topic of this episode is, “What is legislative effectiveness?”

We voters often say that we want our senators and members of Congress to do things, and preferably, the right things. We tend to dislike it when we see people on Capitol Hill who are all talk and no action. And in theory, we should vote out of office those lawmakers who are ineffective.

Let me have a caveat here. To be sure, there are some legislators who have turned noise making into a profitable brand, and they do use it to get reelected again and again. But in my 20 years of watching Capitol Hill, it's my estimate that they comprise a small percentage of the total membership. Most people in Congress are, to varying degrees, trying to get things done. So how, then, are we voters supposed to tell which of these legislators are effective and which are not?

To help me answer that question, I have with me Craig Volden. He is a professor of Public Policy and Politics at the University of Virginia. Dr. Volden is the author of many publications. Critically for this podcast's purpose, he is the founder and co-director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking, which produces scores of legislator effectiveness that you can find at: thelawmakers.org.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.

And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.

Welcome to the program.

Craig Volden:

Thanks so much for having me. It is a delight to join you, Kevin.

Kevin Kosar:

So let's cut straight to the topic of the program. What is legislative effectiveness?

Craig Volden:

This is something that I have been thinking about for a long time working with Professor Alan Wiseman at Vanderbilt University. We wrote a book on the subject about a decade ago called Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress: The Lawmakers.

In that book, we defined legislative effectiveness as, “the proven ability to advance a member's agenda items through the legislative process and into law.” So the key elements of “legislative effectiveness”—proven ability, the agenda items of the member, advancing into law—are in there.

Kevin Kosar:

So as the title of the book indicates, it really does focus on the lawmaking function of an elected official.

Craig Volden:

That's right.

And here, Alan and I founded the Center for Effective Lawmaking. And we like to stay in our lane—it is not the “Center for Effective Oversight” or “Center for Effective Communication with Constituents.” The Center is about lawmaking: what it takes to move those bills into law in the Congress and increasingly now in the state legislatures.

Kevin Kosar:

So you mentioned there was a book about a decade ago. In my intro of you, I mentioned the website, thelawmakers.org.

When did that launch, and what was the motivation behind putting that out there?

Craig Volden:

Our book came out in 2014, and there was certainly some academic interest. But there was also some broader level of interest among members of Congress, in the good governance community, and some private foundations. We were blessed enough to get some grant money and to have a conversation about whether we wanted to continue our research on effective lawmaking into the future and, if so, did we want it to be a purely academic exercise or were we interested in maybe more engagement with Congress and with the good governance community? We are both at career stages after tenure where we can combine those—do research and hopefully make that research of use to others.

As part of that, we looked into what would be the best way to make that contribution, and decided that setting up the Center for Effective Lawmaking—a partnership between Vanderbilt University and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia—made a lot of sense. We have, for example, two dozen faculty affiliates at a variety of colleges, universities, and think tanks, an annual conference, a working paper series, public release of our scores on thelawmakers.org, a small grant competition, etc.—all of the things on the research end that are really helpful to building up a community of knowledge.

On the engagement front, we—along with our good governance partner organizations—generate a new member guide and get involved in orientation materials for new members coming to Capitol Hill. We speak with a variety of organizations that are trying to get people to run for Congress who would be effective once they get there or institutional reformers who are thinking about how to how to make a better Congress.

We aim to be grounded in the research, but simultaneously be of use to the good governance community and to Congress itself.

Kevin Kosar:

Yes. A book is a static creation that cannot be updated unless you release a new edition—you cannot insert new data; you cannot put information on new members of Congress. So a website has got clear attraction to it. Everyone should know also that the website is not behind a paywall—anybody can go take a look at thelawmakers.org.

Now put in terms for non-political scientists out there, how do you measure legislative effectiveness? Do you just count the number of laws that a member's name is attached to as a sponsor or cosponsor? What is the method?

Craig Volden:

We returned to that definition—“proven ability to advance a member's agenda through the legislative process and into law”—to think clearly about how we would objectively measure that.

Prior to our work, there was just the counting up of laws. There was some subjective, “Let's do a survey and see who people think is effective.” We were more interested in a holistic measure, so we actually combine 15 metrics in a weighted average based on the number of bills that any member sponsors, how far they move through the lawmaking process, and how important they are in a substantive sense.

We track five stages of the lawmaking process. For each member of Congress, how many bills did he or she put forward as the main sponsor? But then, how many of those bills received action in committee—a hearing, a markup, a subcommittee vote? How many of them received action beyond committee on the floor of the House or the floor of the Senate—getting to a vote? How many of them passed their home chamber, and how many of them became law?

Since we know that not all of these bills are the same, we downgrade the commemorative bills (e.g., post office naming, minting of coins) and we upgrade the substantive and significant bills—those that get a lot of media attention. These five stages of the lawmaking process and three levels of bill significance combined to 15 weighted average metrics. The things that are rarer—having a law, having a substantive and significant law—then have a much greater weight on one's legislative effectiveness.

We are also recognizing that we are increasingly moving from passing stand-alone bills to conglomerations of bills and ideas into law. The omnibus budget bills or the National Defense Authorization Act (the NDAA) often has embedded within it dozens or hundreds of different pieces of legislation. We are now able to now detect that and give credit for it by using plagiarism style software to find the language that is in bills and see whether it appears in laws later on.

The data available to us is great such that on our website, we are able to give scores for every member of Congress in each Congress from the 1970s right up through the most recently completed 117th Congress and in 21 different issue areas as well. So somebody wondering, ‘Who's really getting something done on defense or in education or in health care?’ can find answers to that and a lot more on our website.

Kevin Kosar:

So I have heard your definition of legislative effectiveness, which is a very individual-centered definition. That would imply that a legislator has a certain extent of authority or power to raise their own effectiveness score. Put a different way, are the most effective legislators inevitably the individuals who lead the House of Representatives or the Senate, the power brokers, those who have been in committee chairs forever and always rack up the high score by virtue of position, or not?

Craig Volden:

We went in with the expectation that we would find that a tenth-term majority party committee