Policy substance and performance in American lawmaking, 1877-1994
Policy substance and performance in American lawmaking, 1877-1994
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DOI：
10.1111/j.1540-5907.2008.00310.x
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发表时间：
2008-04-01
影响因子：
4.2
通讯作者：
Lapinski, John S.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Lapinski, John S.
本文重新思考将政策问题内容和立法意义纳入立法研究的重要性。具体而言，它从理论上证明了为什么立法可能会因政策实质而异，并从经验上证明，如果通过汇总立法而不是按政策问题内容分解法律来研究立法，将会如何得出错误的结论。它通过引入新工具来实现这一目标，包括政策分类系统和衡量公法重要性的方法，以帮助克服一系列与衡量相关的问题，这些问题阻碍了我们更好地理解立法的能力。引入的政策编码模式通过仔细的个人编码应用于 1877 年至 1994 年间颁布的每一项公法 (n = 37,767)。政策问题和重要性数据用于构建许多新的立法绩效衡量标准，并可用于检验国会和美国政治发展研究中的假设。
This article reconsiders the importance of including policy issue content and legislative significance in our study of lawmaking. Specifically, it demonstrates theoretically why lawmaking might vary by policy substance and empirically shows how incorrect conclusions would be drawn if lawmaking is studied by pooling enactments instead of disaggregating laws by policy issue content. It accomplishes this by bringing new tools, including a policy classification system and a way to measure the significance of public laws, to help overcome an array of measurement-related problems that have stymied our ability to better understand lawmaking. The policy coding schema introduced is applied, by careful individual human coding, to every public law enacted between 1877 and 1994 (n = 37,767). The policy issue and significance data are used to construct a number of new measures of legislative performance and are useful to test hypotheses within studies of Congress and American Political Development.