Bill Sponsorship and Congressional Support for Policy Proposals, from Introduction to Enactment or Disappearance

• Author: Paul Burstein,Paul Froese,Shawn Bauldry
• Published date: 01 June 2005
• Date: 01 June 2005
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/106591290505800209
• Subject Matter: Articles

We have learned much in recent years about the

causes of congressional action on policy pro-

posals—about how Congress is affected by

public opinion, the party balance, interest groups, and other

factors. Our conclusions have been based, however, on a

very partial picture of the policy process. Most research

focuses on legislative successes (bills enacted, money appro-

priated, etc.), the final stages of the policy process, and

important or controversial issues. We know relatively little

about congressional action on bills that do not make it to

the final stages of the legislative process, or are neither espe-

cially controversial or important—that is, the vast majority

of bills (on these points, see, e.g., Baumgartner and Leech

1998: 38, 40; Talbert and Potoski 2002: 865; Edwards, Bar-

rett, and Peake 1997: 547; Krutz 2000).

Why so partial a picture? We focus here on what we

believe are two key reasons. First, we cannot explain the ebb

and flow of congressional support for policy proposals from

the time they are introduced because we cannot measure it.

Second, we can say little about congressional action on the

vast majority of bills because the concept of random sam-

pling has not been applied to the study of congressional

action on policy—we have focused on biased samples of

bills or policies without much concern for how this under-

mines our ability to generalize.

This article shows how to begin filling in our picture of

the legislative process. We propose a way to measure con-

gressional support for policy proposals, based on sponsor-

ships and cosponsorships, and use the measure to gauge

support for a (stratified) random sample of policy proposals

from the 101st congress, 1989-1990.

Our measure of support is intended to be used as a

dependent variable in subsequent studies of policy change,

making it possible to test our theories of policy change over

the whole policy process, studying the determinants of

sponsorship as well as roll-call voting and enactment. And

our approach to sampling is intended to improve our abil-

ity to generalize about congressional action.

LEGISLATIVE SUPPORT FOR POLICY PROPOSALS

Analyses of the determinants of legislative action most

often try to explain enactment or some clear result of enact-

ment, such as expenditures. Researchers know they should

examine earlier phases of the legislative process, but seldom

move back beyond roll-call outcomes (particularly in quan-

titative work).1We thus know little about support for policy

proposals never voted on, or about what distinguishes pro-

posals that are voted on from those that are not.

There are two key reasons why we know little about sup-

port for such policy proposals. First, we have no satisfactory

way to measure it. Second, when we try to develop such a

measure, we realize that there is an even more fundamental

problem: we have no good operational definition of the thing

to be measured—of the concept of “policy proposal” itself.

Defining “Policy Proposal”

When we discuss congressional support for something

that has not been voted on, what exactly is the “something”?

295

Bill Sponsorship and Congressional Support

for Policy Proposals, from Introduction

to Enactment or Disappearance

PAUL BURSTEIN AND SHAWN BAULDRY, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

PAUL FROESE, BAYLOR UNIVERSITY

Research on policy change tends to focus on legislative successes (bills that are enacted), policies that are espe-

cially important or controversial, and the final stages of the policy process. This article attempts to show how to

improve our ability to trace support for policy proposals through the entire legislative process, for failures as well

as successes and for less-visible proposals as well as more visible ones. We refine the concept of a “policy pro-

posal”—a particular proposed solution to a public problem—as a set of identical or nearly identical bills intro-

duced into one or more congresses; show how to find such bills, and examine a stratified random sample of 60

considered by the U.S. Congress; describe how much support the proposals receive; show that, in line with some

views of legislative activity, proposals are generally on the agenda for only a short time; and suggest that trends in

sponsorship provide a good way to measure support for particular proposals for policy change. It is argued that

the approach developed in the article will aid subsequent studies of the determinants of policy change.

NOTE: We would like to thank Frank Baumgartner, Alexander Hicks,

Bryan Jones, Wendy Schiller, and John Wilkerson for helpful

advice and comments. Work on this article was supported by NSF

grant SES-0001509.

Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 2 (June 2007): pp. 295-302

1There are many studies of committee support for proposals, but this is

not the same as support in the legislature as a whole.