To satisfy my own curiosity, I found myself crunching some numbers about the 2006 Virginia General Assembly session this evening. Using only the LIS stats, I came up with these three charts. Click any of these to embiggen them.
This first one is based only on the number of bills introduced in each chamber. Turns out the house introduces exactly twice as many.
Next is the attrition rate of bills as they go through the process. We begin with 3,287 bills introduced, and that’s steadily whittled down as they fail.
Finally we have “batting averages” — how well each chamber did with their bills. From left to right, there’s bills introduced in the house that passed the house, bills introduced in the senate that passed the senate, bills that passed in the house that passed the senate, and bills that passed in the senate that passed the house.
The senate appears to be far kinder to the house’s bills than vice versa. The house also appears to kill a lot more of its own bills, presumably because there’s more totally insane bills being introduced into the house than the senate.
There’s nothing earth-shattering here, but I find there’s nothing quite like a graph to give me an overview of something.
Good charts, Waldo. Though, as a small-government Conservative, I would say that this statistic puts the House in a mildly good light/the Senate in a bad light. After all, while twice as many bills are introduced in the House, there are two-and-a-half times as many members of the House, for a lower per-capita average.
Waldo –
Did you take out the commending resolutions?
Nope — it’s all straight from the GA’s own aggregate statistics. Since all bills and resolutions require time and work on behalf of the GA, I think they’re useful in aggregate.
And, James — that’s a great point. I should have had the sense to include that in my original post, but it simply never crossed my mind.