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Tracing the Flow of Policy Ideas in Legislatures: A Text Reuse Approach
Author(s) -
Wilkerson John,
Smith David,
Stramp Nicholas
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/ajps.12175
Subject(s) - lawmaking , legislation , tracing , legislature , reuse , focus (optics) , process (computing) , political science , legislative history , computer science , law and economics , public administration , law , sociology , programming language , engineering , waste management , physics , optics
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.