Bill Sponsorship and Congressional Support for Policy Proposals, from Introduction to Enactment or Disappearance

Research on policy change tends to focus on legislative successes (bills that are enacted), policies that are especially important or controversial, and the final stages of the policy process. This article attempts to show how to improve our ability to trace support for policy proposals through the entire legislative process, for failures as well as successes and for less-visible proposals as well as more visible ones. We refine the concept of a “policy proposal”—a particular proposed solution to a public problem—as a set of identical or nearly identical bills introduced into one or more congresses; show how to find such bills, and examine a stratified random sample of 60 considered by the U.S. Congress; describe how much support the proposals receive; show that, in line with some views of legislative activity, proposals are generally on the agenda for only a short time; and suggest that trends in sponsorship provide a good way to measure support for particular proposals for policy change. It is argued that the approach developed in the article will aid subsequent studies of the determinants of policy change.