We all hear about the gridlock in congress. Partisan politics seems the rule of the day. But how do things look at the state level? Do legislators get along better or worse?
I previously wrote a post about what percent of bills pass, pointing out that Congress passed fewer bills then every single state last session. But let’s do a deeper dive, and look at more than the count of bills passed. Most bills never come up for a vote. But of those that do, we can look at what percent of those get passed. In other words, what percent of votes are “yes”?
Even though only about 2% of federal bills pass these days, about 23% of bills that come up for a vote get passed. Which casts things is in a slightly different vote. Across the country (where I have individual roll call information – blank states are missing data, not missing politicians),
As you can see there’s quite a contrast, again, between how votes go at the federal level and how they go at the state level. For the most part, once a bill comes to a full vote, legislators are in agreement. Of course there might be lots of reasons for these numbers, but in any case, there’s a distinct contrast in how business is done, between states, and even more markedly, between the states and Congress.
But are these bills passing narrowly? Below these huge pass rates is there actually seething conflict? At the federal level, overall, 54% of votes counted are yes votes. And across the country here is what percent of individual votes cast are yes votes over the last couple years:
That’s lots of yeses! (over 8 million yes votes are represented above). We aren’t such a disagreeable country after all.
One more thing. A quick look at how many votes are missed (other, absent, abstain, etc). That’s a *really* small number at the federal level, about half of one percent. Which, for a change, makes Congress typical. Across the nation:
Tons of variation, with the lowest and the highest numbers being two orders of magnitude apart. Perhaps fodder for another post sometime…
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