Replication Data for: Effective Lawmaking Across Congressional Eras

A key concept in American legislative politics is the extent to which members are effective, i.e. have the ability to propose and advance bills on important topics in Congress. We propose a new measure of a member's legislative effectiveness that covers both chambers from 1873 to 2010 and incorporates all 1.1 million introduced bills, opening up a wide range of new opportunities for examining legislative institutions and behavior across this long historical period. To pursue this, we theorize and empirically examine how the determinants of a member's legislative effectiveness hinge on legislative institutions. While uncovering consistent results with the existing literature that has focused on the period starting in the early 1970s, we find striking differences when examining earlier periods. For instance, we find that ideological moderates have higher effectiveness relative to extremists before 1975, whereas the importance of majority-party membership increases dramatically from 1947.