“The public view of Congress is very limited to a few hot-button issues—highly partisan, highly contested ones,” says Craig Volden, professor of public policy and politics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. “But hundreds of bills become law, most of them dealing with substantive issues, not just the naming of post offices. This says that Congress is still working. If we only focus on controversies, we are going to miss the rest of it.”

By concentrating on final outcomes and traditional party dynamics, it’s easy even for policy professionals to miss the role individual lawmakers play in shaping policy outcomes. “I was studying members of Congress, but never actually calling them leaders,” Volden adds. “As political scientists, we’ve been thinking of them as the equivalent of voters on the floor of the House of Representatives.” Yet missing from that picture are the leadership skills—expertise, tenacity, persuasion, coalition-building—that make strong leaders elsewhere. Considering these kinds of abilities, Volden wondered, “Is there a way to measure how effectively individual members of Congress propose, promote and pass laws?”

Working in concert with Professor Alan Wiseman of Vanderbilt University, Volden pursued a major research initiative to answer that question. Over a course of two years, Volden and Wiseman developed software algorithms to track and analyze every bill introduced in Congress since 1973, roughly 150,000 and counting. In addition to tallying final outcomes, the system tracks how many bills each member introduced and how far they progressed in the lawmaking process, as well as scoring each bill for its policy impact. Far-reaching bills score higher than commemorative ones. The result is a Legislative Effectiveness Score (LES) for each member of Congress who has served during the past 40 years.

Innovative research initiatives such as Volden’s work exemplify Batten’s emerging leadership in policy scholarship. By combining deep data analysis with objective legislative outcomes, the LES system gives political scientists the tools to systematically identify broad trends in lawmaking over time. The first major expression of the system will be a book by Volden and Wiseman, The Lawmakers: Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress, to be published in 2014. But the LES system Volden helped develop is robust and flexible enough to enable research for years to come, helping us evaluate our political leaders as well as understand how and why our system works—and why it sometimes does not.

Volden discovered, for instance, that the leaders who make a lasting difference are those who build coalitions. These individuals, he says, “are able to reach across party lines and over from the House to the Senate. Or build a compromise with the President. They are people who had an idea that failed time and time again, but kept with it.”

A few of the conclusions from the research are not surprising. Seniority helps. Being in the majority party helps. Chairing on a powerful committee helps a lot. But by controlling for these expected factors in their analysis, Volden says they were able to coax some unexpected insights from the data.

As a rule, for instance, women legislators are more effective than men, more willing to build coalitions and seek out co-sponsors—a truth that has been widely recognized anecdotally. But less expected, the LES system reveals that the effectiveness of women members of Congress is most pronounced while they are in the minority party. True, men in the majority tend to have a higher LES score than women in the minority, affirming the power of political majorities in Congress. But when an election causes leadership to switch parties, a woman like Marjorie Holt who builds coalitions tends to survive better in the political minority than the typical man in Congress. Further, during highly partisan times such as recent years, the effectiveness of women in the majority party diminishes. Consensus is less important when parties have very little ideological overlap. In the 1970s and 80s when the political parties proclaimed a broader base of shared values, women tended to be more effective than men whether or not they were in the majority.

In addition to women legislators, The Lawmakers examines the fates of two other groups within Congress—African Americans and southern Democrats. While women often score higher than average on the LES scale, both African-American and southern-Democrat members tended to score below average even while in the majority party. Neither group had much policy support from the Democrats in the majority. For southern Democrats, it meant a slow exit from Congress, usually to be replaced by Republicans. African-American members took a different approach, emphasizing membership on key committees over major legislative initiatives.

Over many years, this strategy paid off. “Now, three decades later, [African Americans] are senior members on key committees—and they are really impacting policy now.” For example, Charles Rangel, Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee [at the time of the study], received the single highest LES score of any member of Congress in the study.

When bills are viewed systematically—from introduction to committee to floor vote and passage—the importance of individual legislators becomes clear. For instance, the LES system allows Volden and colleagues to score effectiveness within particular policy areas, such as health care or education. In these areas, personal expertise and tenacity can make one Congress member more effective than roughly half of all the members of the House combined in terms of policy outcomes on key issues.

Upon introduction, the average bill has a four-percent chance of becoming law. In a complex, contentious policy area such as health care, the number drops to two percent. Yet by the time a bill reaches the House floor for a vote, it has roughly a 50-percent chance of passing, regardless of whether it was introduced by a Republican or a Democrat. Viewed in isolation, that fact makes Congress sound almost politically neutral. Where’s all the partisanship we keep hearing about?

In the congressional committees, Volden says, months earlier in the process.

“Too many scholars have been studying political parties, but studying them in exactly the wrong context,” he adds, noting that majority party members are three to five times more likely to get a hearing for a bill they introduce, as well as more than five times as likely to see that bill passed to the House floor for a vote. “We’ve been looking at votes on the floor of the House, where it’s too late to detect the political pressures that take place in committees.”

Unlike party-dominated European parliamentary systems, Congress offers realistic opportunities for members of political minorities to make broad policy changes over time. Often, the difference in outcome for a given bill is the political entrepreneurship of the member that introduces it.

“If we ask if there are remarkable lawmakers in Congress today, most people would say no. But we can find them behind the scenes—and they matter a lot. They are at work, issue after issue, on things that matter to the American people.” 

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• Read Breaking Gridlock: The Determinants of Health Policy Change in Congress
• Read When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men?

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