Bill Passage

The Organization

The American Civic Protection Association (ACPA) is a large, national organization that seeks to protect the rights of all citizens through advocacy efforts against legislation that infringe on civil liberties, challenging such laws in court when they do pass, and ensuring that necessary statutes are in place to protect those liberties.

The Problem

Bills that could infringe on the liberties of one or more groups of citizens are routinely considered before state legislations and when they pass into law, they can affect the well-being of vulnerable populations. However, with the large volume of bills introduced every year and the considerable resources required for either advocacy efforts to challenge the passage of a bill or preparation for a subsequent legal challenge, even a large organization like ACPA cannot do this work for every bill that's introduced.

Goals and Interventions

Given their limited resources, ACPA would like help focusing their efforts on bills based on how likely they are to pass, estimating that their state affiliates can focus on about 15% of the bills introduced in a given legislative session with their efforts around advocacy and legal prep. As a starting point, they would like your help with deciding which bills to focus on in one state to provide a proof-of-concept for this work.

The Data

The data for this project comes from LegiScan, an organization that collects and diseminates data about national and state level legislation and the legislative processes. LegiScan provides an API to acquire continuous updates to the legislative sessions for all 52 states and districts/territories of the US. Therefore, this project uses data that is publicly available. The provided database contains legilative session and bill data for the last ~10 years. The initial raw data was provided by LegiScan as a collection of JSON files. A cleaned schema from the JSON files was created, and includes the following infomation:

• State legislative session information: Information about legislative sessions for each session is available in .sessions with a unique session identifier session_id. Note that legislative sessions can be either periodic regular sessions or special sessions convened by the Governor. The boolean column special indicates whether the session is a special session or not.

• Bill information: Data about bills introduced in each session is provided in ml_policy_class.bills. Each bill has a unique identifier bill_id. Information about the type of the bill, the session it belongs to, bill subjects, the date and the chamber/ body (House/Senate) where the bill was introduced are provided. The url field contains the link to the LegiScan webpage that shows the bill, if needed.

• Bill text information : Bills typically get amended and go through different versions when it moves through the legislative process. The table ml_policy_class.bill_texts contains text and information about different versions of a bill. Each version has a unique identifier named doc_id. Each bill version/text has a type to indicate which form the bill is in (e.g. is it as it was introduced? amendments adopted?) and is indicated by the type_id. The title of the bill and a summary of the bill is given in the fields bill_title and bill_description, respectively. The url fields point to the LegiScan page and the state's webpage for the bill text.

• People information: Information about congress members (both senate and house) related to each session is available in ml_policy_class.session_people. Each member has a unique identifier person_id and information such as their party affiliation, role is provided. Further, several identifiers for external data sources such as follow the money, votesmart, and opensecrets are available as well. In addition, ml_policy_class.bill_sponsors table contains information about people who sponsored each bill.

• Voting information: Voting information for roll calls of bills is available in the table ml_policy_class.bill_votes. Each roll call has a unique identifier vote_id and contains a summary of the votes. Note that if individual person votes for each roll call can be obtained through the LegiScan API (API info provided below) using the roll call id.

• Bill event information: Events that a bill goes through and the status progress of a bill are available in the tables ml_policy_class.bill_events and ml_policy_class.bill_progress respectively.

• Amendment information: Information about amendments made to the bill from the house and the seante is available in the table ml_policy_class.bill_amendments. The links to find the text for the amendment (from the Legiscan website and the State website) are given in the columns legiscan_url, state_url.

• catalog tables: In addition the the ml_policy_class schema, a catalogs schema that contains mappings from LegiScan identifiers to descriptions. For instance, identifiers such as party ids, bill text type ids, status codes are mapped to their descriptions in this schema.

• Legiscan API for additional data: LegiScan API (https://legiscan.com/legiscan) can be used to acquire more data about bills if necessary and the user manual for the API can be found here: https://legiscan.com/gaits/documentation/legiscan.

We've added some information about the dates of regular legislative sessions in regular_session_dates.csv in this repo that you may want to load into your database as well. Note that this file covers regular sessions (but not special sessions) and may be missing some dates (online sources like ballotopedia may help fill these out). Additionally, some states (such as CA) sometimes start their sessions in the December before the year associated with the legislative session, so you may want to look out for potential inconsistencies.