2013 was our first full year. And what a year it was! Thank you to all our users, and our customers, and to all the people who linked our bills in blogs, tweets, and elsewhere. We appreciate your support.
I thought it would be fun to take a quick look at the states and what they did.
First, we always have linked on our home page how many bills were introduced, which is interesting to see as the year develops. Here is a final map for bills introduced in 2013:
And bills passed in 2013:
And, always interesting, the percentage of bills passed in 2013 by state:
You can compare these maps to last year’s in this post. Thanks, as always, to Rich for making these pretty maps.
For comparison’s sake, there were 66 bills passed in Congress this year, out of 6642 introduced, or less then 1%. For historic perspective on that number, see Josh’s fantastic post on Govtrack.US
Closing Out 2013 With Policy Unfinished Which includes this great chart:
As for the content of all those bills, here’s a word cloud of the subject of bills in 2013:
For more details, including word clouds for different states and Congress, see this post.
Here’s how the sessions played out over the year. Bills get introduced pretty quickly in the beginning of the year, with a corresponding spike in actions, but also actions ramping up a few months later. There’s also a flurry of activity towards the end of each session, of course. Finally you can see the uptick in bills getting introduced at the end of the year when pre-filing starts. I also included the end of last year as negative weeks. Notice the counts are on different axes, since there are so many actions.
About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 offers free tools for citizens to easily research legislators and bills across all 50 states and Congress. BillTrack50 also offers professional tools to help organizations with ongoing legislative and regulatory tracking, as well as easy ways to share information both internally and with the public.