Bill Sponsorship in Congress

Bill sponsorship in the American Congress is an outlet for individual legislators to stake out policy positions and set the legislative agenda. This tool is freely available for all legislators to use, whether in the majority or minority party, freshman or senior, Republican or Democrat, male or female. Further, there are relatively few limitations on topics as well as frequency of sponsorship; legislators are free to sponsor as many bills on any topics they wish while serving in office. To date, the scholarly literature has focused almost exclusively on the agenda setting or position taking value of bill sponsorship. Yet, in light of the pressures, constraints, and opportunity cost structure facing legislators every day, I suggest such a widely used tool is leveraged by legislators to satisfy many different goals and to respond to many other pressures, beyond agenda setting and position taking. I expect bill sponsorship to be a strategically and uniquely leveraged tool by legislators in three realms: representation, careerism, and issue ownership and trespassing. To support this argument, I bring to bear numerous theoretical expectations, data sources, and statistical methods. Broadly, I find that legislators use bill sponsorship to indirectly represent constituents, focusing on issues they assume constituents should favor, seen through employment patterns in districts and variance in issue ownership guiding issue focus dependent on the party of the elected legislator. I also find that heritable traits, such as personality, influence the degrees to which legislators decide to align their sponsorship focus with their committee focus to become specialists. Some select this path of careerism, while others do not. Zooming out, I find broadly that bill sponsorship is a valuable form of behavior that deepens an understanding of Congressional behavior in addition to position taking and agenda setting.