Legislative Accomplishment and Policy Issue Substance
This chapter introduces a new measure of legislative accomplishment. To understand lawmaking requires that one move beyond studying political behavior in Congress alone and beyond a complete empirical reliance on roll call votes. Moreover, legislative behavior and legislative outputs must be studied in tandem to gain a proper understanding of the lawmaking process in the United States. Although the idea of studying important lawmaking across time is not controversial, constructing an appropriate measure is not a trivial exercise. The chapter constructs a comprehensive lawmaking data set that provides measures of legislative accomplishment at the aggregate level as well as by specific policy issue areas for a 118-year period. It also explains the construction of Congress-by-Congress measures of legislative accomplishment, including measures broken down by the policy-coding schema.