Replication data for: Measuring Legislative Accomplishment, 1877-1994

In the meanwhile, please contact the author for access to the data Understanding the dynamics of lawmaking in the U.S. is at the center of the study of American politics. A fundamental obstacle to progress in this pursuit is the lack of direct measures of policy output, especially for the period prior to 1946.

The lack of direct measures of legislative accomplishment makes it difficult to assess the performance of our political sy stem. We provide a new measure of legislative significance and accomplishment. Specifically, we demonstrate how item response theory can be combined with a new dataset that contains every public statute enacted between 1877 and 1994 to estimate "legislative importance" across time.