Topical Legislative Efficiency: The Effect of Partisan Context and Policy Type, 1921-2008.

In an effort to better understand the conditions associated with a productive Congress a new measure of "significant" legislation is developed. The measure taps topical legislative output by tracking action on issues brought to the attention of Congressional Digest readers; a journal that has focused on approximately ten salient issues facing the nation each year since the 1920s. A law passed after the Digest raises awareness on the issue, and before the Congress in question adjourns sine die, is the primary measure of productivity used. Furthermore, the Digest topics are disaggregated into foreign, domestic and intermestic policy types to test whether Congress is more proficient in one policy arena than another, but also to test whether there are different predictors of productivity in domestic versus foreign policy. The research uncovers that Congress is not more efficient in passing either domestic or foreign policy, but is decidedly more productive when faced with intermestic policy initiatives. In the secondary analysis it is determined that traditional predictors of legislative productivity perform well when trying to model domestic legislative productivity, but not well at all when foreign policy productivity is the dependent variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]