The states vary dramatically in how they implement the legislative process. I’ve posted before how many bills get introduced, and passed, in each state. I decided it might be interesting to take a look at how many times a bill gets amended during the process.
To refresh your memory, here’s a map of how many bills have been introduced in 2013 so far:
We see New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Texas have the most bills introduced. And Wisconsin, Alaska, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, have an order of magnitude fewer. Quite a contrast. How many bills are passed, however, is much more even across the states. Here’s the picture in 2013 so far:
Some new states pop out, like Arkansas and Tennessee. To be fair, New York and California meet year round, so their count will probably count. The difference between states here is more like a factor of 2. Just as an aside, of 4657 bills introduced in Congress, 22 have been passed. Which puts Congress in a whole different class then the state houses.
How about new versions of bills? Often these are just amendments, occasionally they are whole new bills, introduced as a new version or some existing bill for various procedural reasons. Once we sum up all the versions of bills, although New York and Texas (look at Texas! wow!) still dominate, considering versions does even out the map. And really highlights the smaller states Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming, and Wisconsin as outliers.
How about versions for bills that have passed? If we take out all the bills that aren’t going anywhere, will that level out the counts even more? Let’s take a look.
This looks like a whole different map, doesn’t it? So, to some degree, the number of actual bills (including various versions of bills) that states churn through is much more similar then just the count of introduced bills would imply. Meaning, once again, the process in states varies wildly. Some have just a few versions of a bill, some tend to have many. The states where fewer overall bills are introduced tend to have more amendments to those bills.
Which suggests this last map. The average number times a bill is amended:
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