I’m writing the code to add legislative batting averages to Richmond Sunlight — that is, the percentage of each legislator’s bills that are passed. It seems a pair of top ten lists are in order. The below figures exclude commendations, and cannot include legislation that was killed or withdrawn by its sponsor to make way for a substantially similar bill introduced by another legislator. The number listed is the number that passed, not the total number of bills introduced.
| Name | # | % |
| Sherwood, Beverly | 7 | 78% |
| McQuigg, Michele | 25 | 63% |
| Nixon, Sam | 10 | 59% |
| Iaquinto, Sal | 13 | 57% |
| Scott, Ed | 6 | 55% |
| Toscano, David | 7 | 50% |
| Joannou, Johnny | 4 | 50% |
| May, Joe | 9 | 50% |
| Suit, Terrie | 19 | 50% |
| Landes, Steve | 16 | 47% |
Astute observers will note that this list is 80% Republican. One of the privileges that comes of being a member of the majority party is that one’s bills are far more likely to pass.
I really must give special attention to both Del. Jeff Frederick and Del. Bob Marshall. Each introduced a staggering number of bills (50 by Frederick, 74 by Marshall) and had remarkably low success rates (8% and 11%, respectively) for such a large number of bills.
| Name | # | % |
| Chichester, John | 8 | 75% |
| Martin, Stephen | 9 | 67% |
| Stolle, Ken | 44 | 57% |
| Wagner, Frank | 23 | 57% |
| Stosch, Walter | 40 | 50% |
| Newman, Steve | 21 | 48% |
| Howell, Janet | 24 | 46% |
| Watkins, John | 24 | 46% |
| Wampler, William | 9 | 44% |
| Houck, Ed | 25 | 44% |
Only one member two members of this list — Sen. Ed Houck and Sen. Janet Howell — are Democrats.
Waldo,
A quick check on the brilliant Richmond Sunlight and its top 10 charts: Isn’t House Speaker Bill Howell sort of one for one on his transportation funding patch bill (HB3202) despite a possible flat tire in a pothole after the House rejects some of Kaine’s amendments April 4? He doesn’t carry a lot of bills but one for one on HB 3202 is a big one. And isn’t Janet Howell still a pretty strong D?
Argh — it looks like an error in the SQL I wrote. I think I’m creating the percentage by dividing the number of non-commendations bills by the number of all bills. I’ll be curious to see how much this affects the rankings. If all legislators introduced the same number (or, rather, percentage) of commendations, not a bit. But the more commendations that they introduced, the more that they’re wrongly penalized by my math.
Back to the drawing board. :)
I think you are right, Waldo. In David Toscano’s case, he introduced 14 bills, but three of them were commendations. So his batting average should be 7/11 — .636. And when you say that yo don’t include bills that were absorbed into another bill, do you mean that that bill doesn’t get included in the numerator, or the denominator, or both? David had one that was absorbed into Terrie Suit’s bill, and the substance of his change was advanced. If you were trying to measure whether his initiative became law, he would be 8 out of 11(.727), or at worst 7 out 10 (.700).
Interesting effort, to try to figure all the possibilities of ways that bills can die.
I’m having flashbacks from 4th grade. It doesn’t get included in the top of the fraction which, if memory serves, would be the numerator. :) And the reason for that is simple: there’s no record of why a bill died. If a bill was absorbed into another one, LIS provides no record of that process in any meaningful way. The data just doesn’t exist (at least that I can find) to make it possible to find out what actually happened.
MySQL is choking on the query necessary to improve the above listing. It spins its wheels for ~20 seconds and then gives an error that basically consists of it sobbing quietly. I’ll get this fixed yet.
What does it mean that only 2 of them were democrats? Did you just point that out because it was interesting or can I draw a conclusion from that? (like, elected democrats don’t work as hard, or republicans tend to introduce hopeless bills to make a statement or whatever). This is a neat idea.
It means that it’s a bummer being in the minority party. :) Republicans have been the majority party in the Virginia General Assembly for a few years now and, as such, they hold tremendous sway in which bills get passed and which ones don’t. When a legislator gets a bill passed, that’s a notch in his belt that he can tout when running for reelection. So Republicans work to prevent Democrats from passing legislation. No doubt it would be the same were the roles reversed.