Bills of the 110th Congressional Session
- Written by
- Rebecca
- Date
- 05/26/2009 10:28 a.m.
Everyone has their own thoughts and perceptions on what generally happens to bills as they pass through the legislative process. With the thousands of bills that are introduced every year, it is hard to get an overall sense of what is happening. During the last couple of months, I collected and processed data (from the Thomas Web site run by the Library of Congress) on each bill in the 110th session of Congress in order to understand what happened to all of them.
How the data was processed
I calculated the stages a bill has entered using a set of heuristics developed at the Labs. It is not perfect, but it does provide us with a sense of what happened to each bill. A bill's death date and stage are calculated from the date of the last stage transition the bill makes before the end of the congressional session. Since there is an overlap in types of actions that happen in both the House and the Senate, I normalized the stage names so all bills can be compared with each other. Any stage that takes place at "home" such as "Home Committee Referral" takes place in the chamber of the bill's introduction. Any stage that takes place at "other" such as "Other Committee Referral" takes place in the chamber it was not initially introduced in. Finally, please note that the "Passage" stage means the bill's passage was voted on, it does not necessarily mean that the bill passed. You can read more about all of the stages and what each stage means here.
Let's start with the basics
During the 110th Congress, 11,059 bills were introduced. 7,335 were house bills and 3,724 were Senate bills. Out of the 11,000+ bills, only 442 (4%) became law. Most of these bills died as soon as they were referred to the committees in the chamber the bill was introduced in.
Where else do bills go to die?
We know that most bills die when referred to the home committee(s). But what other stages are lethal?
This flow map helps us visualize where bills go to die. The thickness of the line going into any stage corresponds to the number of bills that died in that stage.
What stages do bills enter?
Now that you have seen the final resting spots of bills, it may be nice to know how many bills enter each stage.
This graph depicts how many bills make it into each stage.
How long do bills live before they die?
Now that we have a sense of where bills go during the legislative process, let us also take a look at the timing. How much time does a bill spend alive before it finally dies?
How long do the bills that don't make it as laws generally live? Suppose all bills in the 110th Congress started on the same day; this chart displays the number of bills that are still alive each day.
Digging deeper...
Still not satisfied? Let us take a look at a visualization that combines both timing and the stages bills enter to get the whole picture.
This visualization will help you have a better understanding as to what happens to each bill over the course of the session. Each bill is represented by a colored box whose size increases as it progresses through the legislative process. A green box means the bill is still alive, blue means the bill is a law, and red means the bill died. Warning: this Flash applet may lock up your browser while loading; this is normal.
To learn more about this project or play with the various features of the visualization please visit The Life and Death of Congressional Bills in the 110th Session.
Discussion
What are Your Thoughts?
Have thoughts that might fuel this discussion further, post them below. (Markdown syntax is supported in comments.)
Rebecca, pretty work! The thing I like the best is how you presented the results in the form of question and answer. Given the data, what useful questions can be answered? Makes your analysis and the visuals easily understandable by most.
One question: Why aren't 100% of bills alive on Day 0 (Life and Death)?
One comment: Don't use 3D charts for 2D data (Stage Histogram).
One more comment/question: Hyperlinks from visuals to the data that drives them would be an improvement in transparency and traceability of results. Is that feasible with your implementation(s)?
Great work! I like the three static charts, those are very nicely focused and informative. I'm not so excited about the Flash "visualization", though. While it's fun to look at for a short time, I find it too busy and really not providing much information.
Perhaps you could present some kind of list with a way to pick particular bills and then showing their timelines (perhaps stacked for several bills, so they can be compared). That would be more informative as a detail visualization.
Is there a chance to get access to your extracted data? I would like to try to play especially with the cross-tabulation of the different stages of the bills, where they go to die, how long they are alive, etc. in one of my visualization tools.
Nice study, Rebecca. Well done! I also like the questions that were posed. Very interesting information.
I would love to see the comparison of how long it takes successful bills to get through (on your line chart). It would be great to see a line for "days to pass" or something. That way we could see if say a bill last over 300 days, it's likely that it's going to fail. I think that would help in trying to kill it sooner and stop wasting time on it. Or kill it / rework it / and re-present it as a new bill.
Does that make sense?
Quick additional comment - can you add a stat for bills passed as another bill (e.g. omnibuses containing previous bills, comprehenive bills containing elements from more limited bills, bills introduced repeatedly or with minor changes, etc.)?
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