Do bills introduced in the upper chamber have a better chance of getting passed than bills originating in the lower chamber? The answer, as always, depends on which state you are looking at. Let’s take a look at the data, starting with where things stand with bills introduced in 2017 as of right now (the end of July, 2017).
We see more bills die than pass. Also, lots of bills are in the TBD category because a handful of states are still in session. More importantly, about half the states have two-year sessions, so most of their bills are still eligible to move along in the process.
Also, when I say bills, I mean everything introduced — both items that will enact new laws (which I will call a bill) and resolutions, which are just expressing an official opinion (more or less). Resolutions generally pass, and pass quite quickly. Here’s the breakdown separating out resolutions:
As you can see, resolutions are very different than bills. There aren’t as many, but they nearly all pass. Now let’s take into consideration which chamber introduced the piece of legislation:
Here we see the lower chambers tend to introduce more bills and resolutions, but the upper chambers seem to have a higher success rate, at least when considered in the aggregate. Just for fun, let’s take a peek at this chart considering only Congress so far this year:
Besides the obvious, which is hardly anything has passed, you’ll notice nearly half of what has passed are resolutions. Not fair, perhaps, since it is so early in the two-year session. (If you enjoy graphs and charts of what’s going on in Congress, you’ll want to keep up with GovTrack’s blog and especially their twitter feed.)
Moving on to consider the states individually, I’m only going to consider states with a completed 2017 session. Let’s start by just looking at how much legislation was introduced, by state:
Faithful readers of this blog will already be aware of the vast disparity between states in the number of bills and resolutions introduced every year. You’ll also notice that the lower chamber introduced more bills than the upper chamber, often by quite a large margin, except in Nevada. So, back to our original question, we have already learned that the upper chambers have a higher success rate overall, but how does that look when we examine the numbers state by state? I’ve limited our look to just bills; we know resolutions generally pass, so they aren’t as interesting.
The first thing that jumps out at me is what is Missouri doing? No wonder they are in their second special session this year. You’ll also see almost a third of the states (Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah) seem to have quite effective upper chambers, clearly passing well over half of the bills they introduce. Those states also have relatively good lower chambers, though not quite as good. Idaho, South Dakota, and Utah, in particular, don’t introduce very many bills that go anywhere.
Now let’s look at all of the states. To compare the states more fairly, I’ve looked at bills from 2015-2016, which only leaves NJ out since they have an even year to odd year session. But I checked 2012-2013 and 2014-2015 in NJ and the results were all within half a percent of the numbers in the chart below, so I think this chart gives a fair picture. You’ll see the answer to my question, does the originating chamber matter, is “in some places”.
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