Workhorses, not show horses: Five ways to promote effective lawmaking in Congress

In case you missed it, the Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) Co-Directors Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman wrote in The Conversation about five key ways that lawmakers in Congress can be effective. Excerpt:

We have spent more than a decade exploring the thousands of bills and hundreds of laws produced by members of Congress each year. We find that individual representatives and senators vary dramatically in how interested they are in lawmaking and how effectively they advance their proposals. And we see opportunities to build a better Congress.

We have devised and generated a “Legislative Effectiveness Score” for each member of the House and Senate for each two-year Congress for the past 50 years. These scores are based on 15 metrics, capturing how many bills each lawmaker sponsors, how far they progress toward law and how substantively significant they are. The scores are politically neutral, with members of both parties scoring higher upon advancing whatever policies they think are best.

Read their piece in The Conversation here.