A little frivolous confection for your holiday enjoyment: comparing how long bills are in different states. Thanks to Rich for a lovely job on the maps, as usual.
As a first comment, the average word length across the country of words in bills is 6.16 letters, vs about 5 letters in common writing. Given the technical language, one would certainly expect words to be longer on average, and 20% longer seems reasonable. But really I wanted to compare how long bills were, in word count, not in letter count. To start with, let’s simply look at the average length length of bills (in words) by state. I was quite surprised by the variation between states. Ohio bills are, on average, longer then bills in Tennessee, by almost 500 words!
Then I thought it would be interesting to look at the length of bills that passed, and bills that failed, and see if there were significant differences. First, the average length of bills that passed:
Ohio stands out even more! Whew. In general, the average of bills that pass seem to be a little longer. Big huge too long to read budget bills probably help drag the average up, but in some places the differences is a longer then can really can be explained by the occasional behemoth bill. In some states, longer bills seem to have a better chance of passing.
Here’s the difference between the overall average, and the average just of bills that passed in map form:
In some states the difference in minuscule, but in some states there is a pronounced preference for longer bills. And in Kansas, it would appear brevity is appreciated.
UPDATE
Thanks David for the suggestion of looking at median length. I had it in my head that each state would have a few much longer bills, particularly the omnibus budget bills. What I didn’t realize is just how long these bills could be. I mean seriously. Who has time to write some of these bills, much less read them? I started to do a histogram to see how many really long bills there are, and deciding on my segments, I decided that order of magnitude was a fair way to categorize bill length. Which is pretty crazy just on it’s own. So here’s bill length distribution over the whole country (notice this graph is semilog):
That’s over 100 bills that are over 100k words long. The head spins a bit at the prospect.
And here’s a map showing how long the longest bill is in each state.
Yes, that’s right Oregon has a bill tipping the scales at … lots … of words. If you are suffering from being awake, here’s the bill: https://www.billtrack50.com/BillDetail/90530 but you’ll have to be patient as you give it time to load. It’s interesting to me to compare this map to the states that pass the highest percentage of their bills from this first eye candy post. Pretty much the states with the lowest max size line up with the states that pass the highest percentage of bills. Coincidence?
So back to the question of median length. The average, or mean, bill length above is simply the total number of words in all the bills in a state, divided by the number of bills in that state. The median, on the other hand, is the what you get when you put all the bills in order of length and then pick out the one right in the middle. For example if you have a group of people who are 5’2″, 5’5″, 5’8″, 5’9″, and 8′ tall, they are an average of 6′ tall, but that gives wrong impression, since the group is actually pretty short. Just like with our bills. 145 are super long, and pull the average over. It’s useful information, but it’s helpful to look at the data by considering the median too. If we line up all our people in our group above their median hight is 5’8″. In some sense, that’s a better picture of our group. So here’s a map of the median bill length:
So forgive me Ohio. I spoke too soon. Looking at median length the difference between states isn’t nearly so large – more like 1000 words instead of 5000 when looking at the average.
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