Excerpt

Federal institutions in the United States, such as Congress and the Supreme Court, play a significant role in lawmaking and, in many observable ways, define our legal system. Thus, legal scholarship has been largely focused on understanding these entities and the role they play in our society. As federal legislative and regulatory data have become more readily available, political scientists and legal scholars have become increasingly quantitative, adopting objective data-driven methods for characterizing political and legal behavior and outcomes. Computationally driven analysis has extended into all areas of law, including analyzing the behavior of Supreme Court justices (Katz, Bommarito, and Blackman 2017; Lauderdale and Clark 2014), congressional legislators (Poole and Rosenthal 2007; Slapin and Proksch 2008), and administrative agencies (Livermore, Eidelman, and Grom 2018; Kirilenko, Mankad, and Michailidis 2014). The aim of most of this research is to move away from purely subjective analysis that is limited in its ability to quantitatively measure and empirically explain observable legal phenomena.

Although many issue areas are regulated primarily at the federal level, state governments also wield significant power, and an increasing number of issues are now being decided at the state or local levels, including emerging industries and technologies such as the gig economy and autonomous vehicles (Hedge 1998). In fact, the total quantity of state legislative activity dwarfs that of Congress. There are 535 members of Congress who introduce over ten thousand pieces of legislation a session,1 of which less than 5% is enacted. In contrast, in the aggregate there are over seven thousand state legislators introducing over one hundred thousand pieces of legislation, with over 30% being enacted.

All US state legislatures work according to a committee system in which, for a bill to be enacted, it must pass through one or more legislative committees and then be considered on the chamber floor (which we refer to as “floor action”). The final step is pivotal (Rosenthal 1974; Hamm 1980; Francis 1989; Rakoff and Sarner 1975), and reaching it is not a given: on average only 41% of bills receive floor action, with most legislation languishing in committees.

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