Measuring Legislative Influence

The study of legislative influence has suffered from serious conceptual and methodological problems, and as a result important theoretical claims on the subject have proven difficult to evaluate. In this paper, I present a technique for measuring legislative influence based on a simple survey instrument administered to congressional staffers. The instrument elicits information about the effect of individual members' preferences on the substance of specific pieces of legislation. The measure is simple, is easy to administer, and squares well with how legislative scholars typically use the concept of influence, while avoiding many of the analytical problems associated with general reputational rankings or indicators derived from behavioral data. The measure stands up well under systematic tests of reliability and validity. And it is applicable to a wide range of bills for which plausible assumptions or reasonable inferences about member preferences are not easily made.

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