Tracing the Flow of Policy Ideas in Legislatures: A Text Reuse Approach

John Wilkerson, David Smith and Nicholas Stramp

American Journal of Political Science, 2015, vol. 59, issue 4, 943-956

Abstract: This article proposes a new approach to investigating the substance of lawmaking. Only a very small proportion of bills become law in the U.S. Congress. However, the bills that do become law often serve as vehicles for language originating in other bills. We investigate “text reuse” methods as a means for tracing the progress of policy ideas in legislation. We then show how a focus on policy ideas leads to new insights into the lawmaking process. Although our focus is on relating content found within bills, the same methods can be used to study policy substance across many research domains.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12175

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:amposc:v:59:y:2015:i:4:p:943-956

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Journal of Political Science from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().