Coalitions of the Willing: Designing Legislation for the Votes You Need

Most laws require support from members of both parties. We test whether the coalition that enacts a bill leaves a signature in the scope and structure of the law it produces. In applying an enacting coalition typology to all public laws passed since 1947, we assess the impact on two measures of legislative design: the breadth of the legislation (versatility) and the clarity with which the law is written (precision). We find a clear relationship between the enacting coalition and the versatility of a law. Bipartisan laws are scoped more narrowly than more partisan legislation. For precision, we report null results. We complement our statistical approach with interviews of the House Office of the Legislative Counsel and two Senate legislative directors to better understand how these mechanisms function in practice. Our combined results suggest that the versatility of a law is a feature of the enacting coalition that is bargained over, whereas precision is contingent on the overall conditions within a given Congress.