BillTrack50 was founded in 2011, and lwe aunched our website in early 2012. Since then we’ve accumulated quite a bit of data, a lot of which I’ve previously given you a look in this Eye Candy blog series. What I haven’t done is a simple overview of the entire database. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Bills
We have just over 450,000 bills in our database. They are not evenly distributed over our four years, though, since some states have no or a reduced session every other year. Of course 2014 isn’t quite over yet, but we shouldn’t see too many more bills introduced.
Of course bills can have multiple versions; an average of 1.7 in fact. Meaning we have just over a three quarters of a million different bill texts in our database. Here’s a look at the timing of when amendments are introduced during the a year (averaged over 2011-2013):
As you can see new versions are being introduced a little more vigorously mid-session than bills, which isn’t too surprising. What is surprising, perhaps, is how many second versions are introduced during the pre-file period at the end of the year.
These bills contain about 4.2 million sections, or about 9.3 sections per bill. Looking even closer, bills are made up of words, of course. In some cases just loads of them. We have a whopping 685,284,810 words recorded in our bill text tables. That’s enough words to stretch from here to the moon! Or it sure seems like it. If words were stretchy. Anyway, that makes for about 1556 words per bill, on average. What states are the wordiest? And least wordy? Let’s take a look:
| word count rank | state | avg words | total words | bill count rank |
| 1 | NY | 1,344.00 | 48,930,357.00 | 1 |
| 2 | NJ | 1,893.00 | 43,330,055.00 | 4 |
| 3 | US | 2,145.00 | 40,383,704.00 | 2 |
| 4 | IL | 1,503.00 | 38,242,914.00 | 3 |
| 5 | CA | 3,184.00 | 30,497,767.00 | 16 |
| 47 | AK | 1,371.00 | 2,054,062.00 | 50 |
| 48 | DE | 1,140.00 | 2,022,440.00 | 49 |
| 49 | ND | 1,085.00 | 1,998,664.00 | 48 |
| 50 | SD | 714.00 | 1,717,400.00 | 45 |
| 51 | WY | 1,201.00 | 1,702,954.00 | 51 |
I included the bill count rank in the table too, so you can see the state with the most bills also has the most words (note the count goes to 51 because I included Congress too, called US in the table). The difference in total words introduced since 2011 between New York and Wyoming is quite astounding, isn’t it?
Here’s a quick look at all the states, with the y axis showing the total word count, ordered by their rank as far as how many bills have been introduced.
Actions
Once a bill is introduced, stuff happens, which we refer to as actions. We have nearly 4 million actions in our database so far, which is about 8.5 actions per bill. (See this blog post about how many actions it takes to pass a bill in each state.)
It is up to the state to decide what actions they report. Some states include scheduling a bill in their bill actions, and some don’t, for example. Thus some states record many many actions, and some just a few. Illinois tops the list with 314k actions in our database, with Texas not far behind at 311k, and then there’s a significant drop to California with 203k. At the small end is OH and DE with just about 10k reported actions each. With such a big disparity it’s no surprise that just 11 states account for half of the actions in our database:
We’ve also looked at it before, but here’s how bills, actions, and votes play out over the year (by week):
Votes
Another huge part of our database is votes, particularly individual legislator votes. Overall we have just over 300,000 votes in our database. Which represents a little less than one vote per bill. But if you consider the average just for bills that have at least one vote, the average number of votes per bill is 2.9 votes per bill. As you can see from the chart below, almost no bills have 7 or more votes.
As far as actual individual votes for each legislator, we have a whopping 18,221,942 of those. Wow! That’s a lot of people and a lot ayes and nays! Overall, legislators vote overwhelming yes:
Did you know legislators were such an agreeable bunch? That’s 15 million Ayes to just 2 million nays! For more details about how the breakdown looks per state, see this old eye candy post.
I hope you enjoyed this stroll through our database. We’ve got lots of other data in there too, of course, but my head is already spinning at these numbers so that data will have to wait for another day. If there’s something in particular you’d like me to cover that I didn’t please leave a comment or contact me directly.
About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 is a user friendly free service that provides legislation research in all 50 states and federally. BillTrack50 also offers legislation and regulation tracking across the nation with tools to help organization stay on top of changes (bill sheets and alerts) and share legislation they are tracking with key stakeholders (legislator scorecards, widgets and stakeholder pages). If you are interested in learning more about how BillTrack50 saves organizations time and money, sign up for a demo and try it out BillTrack50 Pro for a month, for free.