Lawmaking in the US Congress seldom occurs at a steady pace; the issue at hand and the agenda of members and interest groups can influence how quickly policy change occurs. In new research, Jonathan Lewallen examines the ebb and flow of Congressional lawmaking since 1949, finding that the last 30 years have seen greater increases and then decreases in lawmaking in certain policy areas. He writes that policymaking has become less incremental as policy disagreement within Congressional committees has become more partisan, disrupting the interactions that produce incremental changes.
In new research, I find that the US lawmaking issue agenda since 1995 has been less incremental compared to earlier periods, with fewer small changes from one year to the next and more moderate and very large shifts in attention. We are seeing more large increases in lawmaking volume within a given policy area over certain periods of time followed by large decreases.
The ebb and flow of consensus and disagreement lie at the heart of policy change. Within political science and public policy, our story of how lawmaking works tends to be told like this: networks of interest groups work with the relevant congressional committee leaders and agency bureaucrats to make policy. Over time these actors (collectively called a policy subsystem, though some readers may be familiar with the older term, ‘iron triangle’) all come to understand the way policy “should” be made in similar ways and keep each other in check: strong deviations from the “normal” way of doing business by one part of the subsystem are met with strong reactions from the others. Repeated interactions and anticipated reactions within policy subsystems produce slow and incremental policy change.
Policy subsystems and policy change
This way of policymaking and its incrementalism favors some interests over others. The interests that lose out then try to shop their policy ideas around to new venues: the states vs. the national government, for example, or even simply other subsystems. And committee leaders are always on the lookout for new issues to add to their portfolios so they can gain more policymaking authority. When a new subsystem (i.e. a combination of interest groups and lawmakers) takes hold of an issue, they define it in different ways, adopt different alternatives, and we see very large policy changes or “punctuations.” We can show the ebb and flow of incrementalism and punctuations graphically (Figure 1): a distribution’s peak represents the incremental changes, while the distribution’s tails represent the punctuations.
Figure 1 – Congress-to-congress changes in public laws by issue-congress

Source: U.S. Policy Agendas Project Public Laws dataset
Data on changes in public laws by issue from the US Policy Agendas Project show that we have seen more punctuations (longer tails) and less incrementalism (shorter peaks) in US lawmaking since 1995 than we did from the 1950s to the 1990s. For instance, 1949 to 1994 saw one year with an increase in laws over 500 percent: Education saw a 1,900 percent increase in laws from 1953 to 1954. Since 1995, however, we have seen five instances of a greater-than-500 percent increase in laws for a given issue including a 1,600 percent increase in Social Welfare laws from 2003 to 2004 and a 1,200 percent increase in Labor-related laws in 2017-2018. The past 30 years also have seen large decreases in attention, mostly after Congress moved to enact policy following the global housing and financial crisis in the late-2000s; once Congress enacted significant laws like the Dodd-Frank consumer protection law, the institution moved on to other issues and topics like Housing fell off the agenda.

“Senate Hearing “Moon to Mars- NASA’s” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by NASA HQ PHOTO
Why has policymaking become less incremental?
There are two potential explanations for the changes over time I found. First, it’s possible that policy disagreement within committees has become more partisan, which disrupts the interactions and anticipated reactions that produce incremental changes. Second, party leaders have gained more authority to set the legislative agenda in recent decades and could be using that authority to bypass committees entirely and with them the subsystems that reinforce the status quo.
My results indicate that the first explanation has more support. I measured committee disagreement using “views” attached to committee reports. When a congressional committee advances a bill, it includes a report describing the committee’s work on that bill. Although the report is meant to reflect the entire committee’s work, any committee member can attach their own “views.” Legislators have three types of views available to them: additional, which tend to reflect minor disagreements; dissenting; and minority views, which tend to involve a significant number of the committee’s minority-party faction. My analysis finds issues with higher percentages of minority views—where disagreement is partisan rather than along some other divide—have seen fewer incremental changes in lawmaking outputs since 1995.
The issues that have seen the most-partisan conflict over the past three decades are those that frequently divide Republicans and Democrats in other arenas: Education, Labor, Microeconomics, and Civil Rights and Liberties. Policy disagreement within congressional committees, meanwhile, tends to be least partisan for several infrastructure-related issues like Public Lands and Water, Transportation, and Energy (see Figure 2 below).
Figure 2 – Partisan conflict in congressional committee reports by policy agendas project major topic

What about traditional notions of “gridlock?” I find limited support for the idea that divided partisan control of Congress and the White House is related to either incremental changes or punctuations with one exception: divided party control of the House and Senate is associated with fewer large decreases in law outputs since 1995. Put another way, having different parties in the majority for the two chambers of Congress makes it less likely that issues already on the lawmaking agenda drop off significantly.
Partisanship affects policy subsystems
The data on changes to US lawmaking and my analysis tell us two important things about policy change today. First, committee chairs traditionally were given a significant role in managing conflict within their panels. We are seeing more partisan conflict in committees when the chair pursues their personal priorities at the expense of other issues the minority party feels deserve more attention, and when the chair fails to give the minority party a significant role in the lawmaking process (whether in asking questions at hearings or even holding hearings to gather information before advancing a bill).
Second, we need to merge the policy process view of lawmaking that de-emphasizes the role of partisanship with the preferences-and-institutions view of lawmaking. Parties do not simply take conflict happening within subsystems and expand it to change who participates. Parties and partisanship are operating at the issue agenda level in ways that change how policy subsystems operate, and therefore the stability or volatility of lawmaking.
- This article is based on the paper ‘The decline of incrementalism in U.S. lawmaking’ in Policy Studies Journal.
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- Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.
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