Chapter 5 Describing the Data - Legislatures | Health Policy Reform in the 50 States, 2011-2022

5.1 Outcomes

Most introduced bills fail. In unified party-control legislatures, only about a quarter pass. The failure rate is substantially higher in split legislatures, near 90%. This is to be expected given that both chambers need to agree on a bill for it to pass.

Bill Outcomes

But what is the content of the bills that pass? Of that minority of bills that pass, moderate bills tend to do very well in all types of legislative context. However, liberal bills do surprisingly well in Republican states, where they constitute only a few percentage points less than do conservative bills. In contrast, liberal bills in Democratic legislatures constitute nearly four times as many passed bills as conservative ones.

Bill Outcomes by Ideology

5.2 Sponsorship

We begin our analysis of bills by examining who sponsors them.

Challenging when there are > 50,000 bills in the data
Proxy measure: Ideology of the median sponsor
Divided into terciles based on all unique legislators

5.2.1 Sponsorship by Party

We begin with examining the universe of bill introductions, divided by legislative control: unified Democratic or Republican, and split control.

Unified partisan legislatures show a native advantage for bill introductions to the majority party, though this advantage is most pronounced for Democratic legislatures. Perhaps unsurprisingly as well, split legislatures are more evenly split in bill sponsorship.

Introduced Bills by Sponsor Partisanship

What about bills that actually passed? Unsurprisingly again, the modal passed bill in unified legislatures is from the party in control. However, notice the relative success of Democratic bills in Republican legislatures compared with Republican bills in Democratic legislatures. Note, too, the large number of passed bipartisan bills in all types of legislatures.

Passed Bill Sponsorship Rates

We can see how well bipartisan bills do when we look at hit rate of bills passed by partisanship. In fact, bipartisan bills pass at higher rates in unified majority legislatures than they do in split majority states.

Hit Rate of Sponsored Bills

5.3 Trends

The liberal advantage for health bills has existed for a decade and a half. The plot below shows the median sponsor ideology for passed bills in the entire United States. It has gone up and down a little over time, but has only ever been near zero once, in the wake of the 2016 elections. In other words, in every single year of the data, policy has been moving more leftward than rightward across the country as a whole.

Average Passed Bill Sponsor Ideology over Time

Now we split the country into the familiar three categories. Examining the median sponsor ideology shows that bills sponsored in Democratic states are amongst the most liberal quarter in the state – and have been getting more liberal over time.

Strikingly, the same is true for bills in Republican states. These are sponsored by the equivalent of the most liberal quarter of Republicans.

Average Passed Bill Sponsor Ideology over Time by Majority Party

5.4 Outcomes by State

Liberal bills do better in Democratic majority states than conservative bills in Republican majority chambers. In Republican majority chambers, moderate bills do almost as well as conservative ones; the same is not true in Democratic chambers.

We can see this by looking at the percentage of liberal bills passed in the states. Blue states are unsurprisingly the home of liberal bills.

Passed Liberal Bills by State

While red states disproportionally feature the passage of conservative bills, it is not nearly to the commensurate degree.

Passed Conservative Bills by State

Moving from a categorial to a continuous measure, we can see the median bill sponsor for passed bills across the country. Notice that, while the median passed bill in Texas and Florida is moderately conservative, the equivalent in California and New York is a strongly liberal bill.

Median Sponsor

We combine the trend and state information in the following slopegraph. The figure in some respects is unsurprising. States like California and Washington State pass consistently liberal bills, while states like Arizona and Oklahoma pass consistently conservative bills. Other states exhibit understandable transitions, like Arkansas and West Virginia which have become much more conservative over time. What is surprising are large states like Florida and Texas passing health bills very often times authored by liberals.

State Bill Sponsorship Trends by State, Northeast

State Bill Sponsorship Trends by State, Midwest

State Bill Sponsorship Trends by State, South

State Bill Sponsorship Trends by State, West

5.5 Partisan Asymmetry

5.5.1 Majority Rolls

Majority party rolls

The norm for a majority party not to enable votes on bills that might pass without the support of the majority of the majority party
Sometimes called the “Hastert rule”
Example of negative agenda control highlighted by cartel theory of Congressional organization
Only 41 violations between 1991 and 2018 in US House (0.6% of all final passage roll calls)
What about the states? (Anzia and Jackman 2013)

The figure below shows the raw data. Of course, rolls happen in chamber votes. But in keeping with the focus on bills in this chapter, I aggregate to the bill level. Thus, the data shows the times rolls happen within any roll call on a given bill, as a percentage of all bills that ever had a floor vote.

Majority Party Rolls Vary by Party

Chapter 5 Describing the Data - Legislatures