I’ve posted tons of stats about the Utah Legislature in the past couple days. To recap, here’s a quick summary of some of what you can now find here:
Do legislators work enough to justify their salary? If you take the number of hours they work and divide it into their pay, it’s not as glamorous as you might think.
Were Democrats able to pass their bills this year? Given that they control only 17-19% of the seats, they still passed a respectable 43% of their bills. However, the gap between the Democratic and Republican batting averages grew substantially this year.
The closest votes in the 2013 Legislature. Utah Legislators continued their norm of passing most things out by overwhelming 90+% majorities, but there were still some close votes. I list the 20 closest votes for each chamber here.
How quickly were bills passed in 2013? In 2011, legislators shifted toward introducing their bills later and, as a result, processing them much faster. That change has leveled off, not deepened or reversed, with 2013 looking a lot like 2011 and 2012.
Who voted “nay” most often in 2013? That’s right. I’ve ranked legislators by how often they did (or didn’t) vote “nay.” The overall winner was Dan McCay.
Who ran the most bills in the 2013 Legislature? Some legislators sponsored lots of bills; some passed lots of bills. The two lists don’t line up as much as you might think, though. I calculate an effectiveness score for each legislator (at least, those who sponsored at least a handful of bills) reflecting the percentage of their bills that they managed to pass.
Who missed the most votes in 2013? With so much to do in the brief 45-day session, legislators often leave the voting floor to tend to their other responsibilities. You’ll find the data here.
Bonus: My colleagues posted polling data a few weeks ago showing what Utah voters think about gun policy and about the John Swallow allegations.
That’s it for now. There may be more in a couple weeks. I’m sitting on other material that I just don’t have time to post about right now. I collect more statistics about the Utah Legislature than I blog about here. You can find all (well, most) of my statistics here: Utah Legislature statistics and trends.
Possibly related posts:
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Recap: The 2014 Utah Legislature (March 19, 2014)
Could I make suggestion for future study? How much money do Utah legislators request in their sponsored bills? Who requests the most? What is the biggest request? What’s the average request? Is there a difference between the average Democratic and Republican total requests?
I suppose the easiest way to find this is to go through fiscal notes, but if there is another way, I would be interested in knowing that.