Alex Steil

One of the more common measures of determining whether or not Congress was effective in a particular year, or group of years, is to verify the number of total laws passed. While Congress is the Legislative Branch of government, there is more to the overall picture than just the passage of laws. Congress has a varied workload: from confirming presidential nominees to passing laws to holding town halls with constituents, there is more than just that single measure. This project looks to quantify a broad measure of Congressional workload, to get a much more precise sense of how effective Congress is. By relying on outside metrics, the project finds the number of town halls put on by members of Congress during a single, two-year period; quantifies measures of party leadership by using institutional metrics; includes different levers of the policy-making process; compares the effectiveness of political leaders against those of individual members; compares the rate of bipartisan members against the number of laws passed in a given Congress; and includes other measures of legislative productivity.