The Landscape of Lawmaking

• In Event: Lawmaking Today

Abstract

The textbook legislative process portrays individual lawmakers developing policy ideas, introducing bills and shepherding those bills through a sequence of stages to become law. We portray bills as vehicles (rather than policies) and the legislative process as a landscape of policymaking opportunities (rather than a series of hurdles that a bill sponsor must overcome). We systematically examine what happens to the substance of bills between their introduction and enactment. The potential value of such an examination is suggested by several questions that - to our knowledge - have never been studied: How much do congressional bills change as they progress through the different stages of the legislative process? In what ways do they change? Where in the legislative process do these changes occur?

Authors

• John D. Wilkerson, University of Washington

• Andreu Casas, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam