Legislators’ Strategy to Propose Bills Under Limited Resources and Information Processing Capability

The legislative activities of congressmen are a major research topic in the literature, but few scholars have explored the relationship between different types of legislative activities. This paper studies the relationship between two types of private members’ bills: counter proposals and self-initiating bills. Due to limited resources, attention, and information processing capability, we argue that legislators will hire a limited number of legislative assistants and choose certain policy areas to focus on. To make full use of the information base and ability of their assistants, legislators may propose as many bills as possible in their selected policy areas, whether counter proposals or self-initiating bills. In other words, if the legislator hires more assistants, he will submit more self-initiating bills and counter proposals at the same time, to maximize the number of total proposed bills. Therefore, there should be a positive relationship between the numbers of these two types of private members’ bills, and the policy areas covered by them should be highly overlapping. To verify the above arguments, we analyze the bills proposed by Taiwan’s legislators, and the results are consistent with the above expectations.