Copy and Paste Lawmaking: Legislative Professionalism and Policy Reinvention in the States

• Date: 01 July 2019
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X18776628
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X18776628

American Politics Research

2019, Vol. 47(4) 739 –767

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X18776628

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Article

Copy and Paste

Lawmaking: Legislative

Professionalism and

Policy Reinvention in

the States

Joshua M. Jansa1, Eric R. Hansen2,

and Virginia H. Gray3

Abstract

Research on policy reinvention tends to focus on whether policies become

more or less comprehensive over time while neglecting to explain copying

policy language verbatim. We argue that the extent to which lawmakers

reinvent policy depends on the resources available to them. Lawmakers

serving in more professional state legislatures have greater capacity to

reinvent policies. In contrast, lawmakers serving in less professional

settings are more likely to copy policy language. As evidence, we gather

bill texts of 12 policies that diffused across the 50 states between 1982 and

2014. Using cosine similarity scores to measure language copying, we find

that less professional legislatures copy more text from previous adopters,

and that the likeliest culprit is a lack of funding for staff assistance. The

findings have implications for states’ ability to amend policies to suit their

own citizens’ needs.

Keywords

policy reinvention, legislative professionalism, text analysis, state politics

1Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, USA

2Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

3The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC USA

Corresponding Author:

Joshua M. Jansa, Oklahoma State University, 233 Murray Hall, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA.

Email: joshua.jansa@okstate.edu

776628APRXXX10.1177/1532673X18776628American Politics ResearchJansa et al.

research-article2018

740 American Politics Research 47(4)

As policy ideas diffuse from one state to others, lawmakers tend to adjust the

content of the policy to fit the political and economic circumstances of their

own states (Boehmke, 2009; Carley, Nicholson-Crotty, & Miller, 2017;

Clark, 1985; Glick & Hays, 1991; Hays, 1996; Karch, 2007; Mooney & Lee,

1995; Taylor, Lewis, Jacobsmeier, & DiSarro, 2012). Political scientists

have traditionally viewed reinvention as a process of social learning through

which later adopting states make adjustments that are increasingly compre-

hensive and converge upon an optimal policy (Glick & Hays, 1991; Mooney

& Lee, 1995). However, researchers have noted that as some states reinvent

policy ideas, others simply adopt policies with language copied and pasted

from previous adopters’ bills (Hertel-Fernandez, 2014; Hertel-Fernandez &

Kashin, 2015; Kroeger, 2015). Why do some states reinvent policy whereas

others copy it verbatim?

In this study, we are interested in exploring how legislative institutions

create incentives for lawmakers to copy language from other states and, con-

sequently, disincentivize policy reinvention. We argue that states with less

professional legislatures will be more likely to copy language from previous

adopters. Features of professional legislatures, like extended time in session

and greater staff assistance, give lawmakers greater opportunity to identify

social problems and consider policy solutions, including those advanced in

other states. Lawmakers facing similar policy problems in less professional

legislatures have a reduced capacity to reinvent policy, and are more likely to

borrow policy solutions with few changes from other states.

For evidence, we turn to the texts of nearly 400 bills for 12 policies that

diffused across the states between 1982 and 2014. We calculate cosine simi-

larity scores, a method used to detect plagiarism, to determine the amount of

copied text in passed versions of state legislative bills. Analyzing the data

using a Heckman selection model to distinguish factors that lead to bill adop-

tion and text copying, we find strong support for our hypothesis that less

professional legislatures copy more text from previous adopters. The results

suggest that a lack of resources for legislative staff could be responsible for

that relationship, though the findings on this point are not conclusive.

This study contributes a new strategy for measuring policy reinvention,

adding to a growing body of research that uses text analysis methods to study

and understand how and why policies diffuse across states (Garrett & Jansa,

2015; Hertel-Fernandez & Kashin, 2015; Kroeger, 2015). It also provides

evidence that better-resourced state legislatures tend to be more innovative

because they have greater staff resources. Although it is popular to slash leg-

islative staff budgets, or let them stagnate, doing so can curb the legislature’s

ability to innovate in policy and to address emerging social problems.