The study of legislative productivity—that is, the quantity, substance, and quality of lawmaking—has been at the center of congressional research in recent years. Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress offers a new way forward for scholars, moving beyond the traditional macro-level claims about divided government, chamber differences, and public policy demand. Instead, Craig Volden and Alan E. Wiseman focus on micro-level explanations, examining the determinants of legislative success for individual lawmakers, and in the process, answering important questions about the operation of Congress in a time of strong parties and intense polarization.

The authors make a simple claim, but one that may strike many as surprising: Some members of Congress, like professionals in every occupation, are just better at their job than others. But, they ask, why do certain members overperform, relative to their peers, and how important is individual-level skill, especially when the influences of institution-level factors, such as parties and committees, are accounted for? Volden and Wiseman demonstrate convincingly, using a detailed empirical analysis, that members are not interchangeable and that the quality of representation varies dramatically.

It is difficult to capture the set of informal skills used by legislators in Congress and as a result, the authors rely on readily observable outcomes that capture lawmaking “success.” Specifically, the book develops a “legislative effectiveness score” for each House member from 1973 to 2008, based on how far their agenda item advances through various stages of the legislative process. The scoring begins with the introduction of a bill, and continues through committee action, committee discharge, House passage, and enactment, with a member receiving credit for his or her bill if it clears each subsequent hurdle. The measure also smartly weights bills by legislative stage, such that later bill actions, such as chamber passage, contribute more to a legislator’s effectiveness score than do earlier stage actions, such as introduction. Volden and Wiseman acknowledge some of the limitations of the measure, but validate it in a number of interesting ways. They show that the scores for members are correlated over time, even accounting for majority party status, suggesting that the measure captures some inherent lawmaking ability for an individual legislator. They also find that longer-serving members have higher scores, that freshman members with higher scores are more likely to achieve a leadership position or higher office, and that the most effective members are those one would expect: committee chairs, subcommittee chairs, and majority party members, though significant variation exists even between individuals in these groups.

The empirical chapters explore the causes and consequences of effectiveness in a variety of ways. Chapter 3 draws on existing theories of legislative organization to determine the role of majority party status, moderate ideological orientation, and committee leadership in legislative success. Because the authors’ measure captures the different stages of the lawmaking process, they pinpoint the roots of majority party power, demonstrating that majority party members are much more likely to receive favorable committee action than minority party members. Majority party power, then, seems to be a function of standing committees’ gatekeeping power.

Chapter 4 is a particularly interesting look at the processes used by three different minority coalitions in Congress: women, African Americans, and Southern Democrats. Each of these groups would seem to be similar in that they occupy an important representational niche in the Democratic Party, and each must depend on attracting support from a broader coalition to achieve policy success. However, as Volden and Wiseman show, these three groups employ very different strategies that have produced different levels of policy success. Much of the literature on female lawmakers demonstrates that they overperform their male colleagues because they focus on consensus building and bipartisan issues. The authors add an important insight to this claim: Women only do better in the minority as compared to minority party men, but there is no difference in legislative effectiveness between majority party men and women. This example highlights that party status matters, but even members of the minority can achieve a certain level of legislative success.

African Americans are found to be less effective lawmakers when in the majority as compared to other Democratic majority party members. This result is likely a function of the issues they choose to pursue, which tend to be those that Congress has traditionally struggled to address, like poverty, and the fact that the group tends to be significantly more liberal than other Democratic members, making it harder to attract support for their legislation. Similarly, Southern Democrats would seem to have been important to the Democratic majority, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, because they were close to the chamber median. Volden and Wiseman find the opposite, that like African American members, Southern Democrats were actually less effective, probably because Democrats only infrequently needed their votes and because they were not reliable members of the coalition. The authors also show that the performance gap between Southern Democrats and other Democrats narrowed in the 1980s as conservative Southerners became Republicans or were replaced by more liberal Democrats.

Chapter 5 explores legislative gridlock, and reconstructs legislative effectiveness scores by policy areas to determine which tend to be more productive, and which types of members are successful in addressing these issues. This allows the authors to identify specific issues where the majority party has the greatest advantage, where issue expertise among members matter, and where some members outperform others. Chapter 6 takes a different tack, selecting a few typical legislators to qualitatively explore the factors that make some members better at their jobs. The chapter is an in-depth look at the habits of successful lawmakers that offers a how-to manual for current or future members.

The book is engaging and accessible, appropriate not only for political scientists but also for anyone interested in the connections between individual members and the policy outcomes produced in Congress, including graduate and undergraduate students. Many of the chapters begin with motivating vignettes that describe the actions, goals, and successes of a few members. Further, the individual legislative success scores developed by Volden and Wiseman are useful to scholars by offering a more substantive measure of individual legislative activity as compared to the cosponsorship or bill introduction data now commonly used. With these effectiveness scores, one could look at relationships with reelection vote share, the likelihood of becoming a party leader, or fund-raising ability. In reading the book, I could not help but wonder how well my local congressperson performed relative to other members.

Although the authors focus on activity within Congress, one notable question emerges on the representational consequences of legislative effectiveness. Do voters care about the quality of their representative? Do they have any sense of who performs well and who performs poorly? If not, then what is the incentive for legislators to work hard? Why be a workhorse rather than a show horse? The authors themselves ask many of these questions in the conclusion, but the role of successful lawmaking and the implied electoral implications are not explored in the book. This is an important area for future research. Still, the substantial theoretical and empirical innovations explored in Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress make it an important work on legislative productivity.