Copy and Paste Lawmaking: Legislative Professionalism and Policy Reinvention in the States
Item
Title
Copy and Paste Lawmaking: Legislative Professionalism and Policy Reinvention in the States
List of Authors
Joshua M. Jansa; Eric R. Hansen; and Virginia H. Gray
Abstract
Research on policy reinvention tends to focus on whether policies become more or less comprehensive over time while neglecting to explain copying policy language verbatim. We argue that the extent to which lawmakers reinvent policy depends on the resources available to them. Lawmakers serving in more professional state legislatures have greater capacity to reinvent policies. In contrast, lawmakers serving in less professional settings are more likely to copy policy language. As evidence, we gather bill texts of 12 policies that diffused across the 50 states between 1982 and 2014. Using cosine similarity scores to measure language copying, we find that less professional legislatures copy more text from previous adopters, and that the likeliest culprit is a lack of funding for staff assistance. The findings have implications for states’ ability to amend policies to suit their own citizens’ needs.
Date
2019
Publication Title
American Politics Research
Publisher
Sage Journals
Identifier
DOI 10.1177/1532673X18776628
Bibliographic Citation
Jansa, Joshua M., Eric R. Hansen, and Virginia H. Gray. 2019. Copy and Paste Lawmaking: Legislative Professionalism and Policy Reinvention in the States." American Politics Research 47(4): 739-67."
