Republican House bills advance with 2-to-1 margin over Democrat legislation

Republicans currently control an overwhelming majority of the seats in the Missouri House of Representatives. With Republicans in 105 of the 163 seats comes complete control of the legislative calendar. We rarely stop to examine how the magnitude of this control impacts how legislation advances in the chamber, in particular whether discussion ever even begins on some proposals.

To date during the 2011 legislative session, 1,144 legislative proposals have been filed with 51 percent of those proposals getting some level of activity from a committee hearing or beyond. At this point in the session---with just 3 weeks left---the other 49 percent will not likely see the light of day.

A total of 79 percent of the proposals that received some legislative action were primarily sponsored by Republicans. In other words, even though Republicans control fewer than two-thirds of the House seat, their members' legislation advances at a disproportionately faster rate. Just one-third of Democrats' 360 proposals have received any action compared to 58 percent of Republican proposals.

Controlling the agenda is, however, at the mercy of the majority and some may say that the mere fact some Democrats' proposals advanced at all is a sign of good will from Republicans.

Of course the other advantage Republicans have in this comparison over Democrats is a responsibility to govern that comes with control. That is, because Republicans chair the body's committees, those members often file major legislation or omnibus proposals. For example, Rep. Ryan Silvey, chairman of the House Budget Committee, files the state's 15 budget bills.

Our analysis of legislative activity turned up another interesting fact: second-term representatives on average see their proposals advance more than their third or even fourth term counterparts.

Based on a descriptive statistical model controlling for political party, term, type of bill (HB v HJR, HCR, etc.), and appropriations bills, a House Bill filed by a second term representative was 1.2 times more likely to see action than a third or fourth term colleagues. In fact, third and fourth term representatives had a statistically significant negative impact on the probability of advancement of a bill (p<.05). Not surprisingly, the most important factor in determining advancement of a proposal was whether a proposal was sponsored by a Republican (p<.001). A second term Republican is twice as likely to see bills advance as a Democrat with the same level of seniority. For more senior Democrats, however, the probability of success is even lower with Republican proposals being almost six times as likely to advance for fourth-term representatives.

Admittedly one of the items not controlled for in the descriptive discussion or the model above is whether substantially similar proposals were offered by multiple representatives. For example, a quick search for the term "citizenship" in the House search engine returns two similar bills add citizenship status to the state's sex offender registry (HBs 62 and 731).

The negative effects for proposals advocated by more senior members of both parties may be explained by several other factors. For instance, perhaps while those members served in previous terms their top priorities were successfully legislated leaving lower priority bills for their final term. It's also plausible that party leadership advance proposals from more junior members to improve the probability of re-election, since successfully passing a bill provides a strong campaign talking point demonstrating an individual's effectiveness as a legislator.

Whatever the reason, the central point here is still that Republican proposals are intuitively and statistically more likely to advance even to the stage of receiving a public hearing. Then again, it would be logistically infeasible for a part-time legislator told hold 1,000 hearings in the short five month legislative session. The way the legislature functions sometimes, it's a wonder action was taken on even half the proposals filed.

Then again the whole concept of representative democracy hinges on a separation of powers and functions making it difficult to modify laws unless publicus demands change.

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