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Out of nearly 70,000 bills introduced in the U.S. Congress from 2001 to 2015, only 2,513 were enacted. We developed a machine learning approach to forecasting the probability that any bill will become law. Starting in 2001 with the 107th…
Using lobbying data from OpenSecrets.org, we offer several experiments applying machine learning techniques to predict if a piece of legislation (US bill) has been subjected to lobbying activities or not. We also investigate the influence…
The increasing digitization of political speech has opened the door to studying a new dimension of political behavior using text analysis. This work investigates the value of word-level statistical data from the US Congressional…
Predicting how Congressional legislators will vote is important for understanding their past and future behavior. However, previous work on roll-call prediction has been limited to single session settings, thus did not consider…
The United States leads the world in the number of mass shootings that occur each year, even as policy making on firearms remains polarized along party lines. In the face of increasing violence and public demand for policy action, we ask…
Special interest groups (SIGs) in the U.S. participate in a range of political activities, such as lobbying and making campaign donations, to influence policy decisions in the legislative and executive branches. The competing interests of…
We explore the ability of large language models (LLMs) to engage in subtle deception through strategically phrasing and intentionally manipulating information. This harmful behavior can be hard to detect, unlike blatant lying or…
In the United States, national policies often begin as state laws, which then spread from state to state until they gain momentum to become enacted as a national policy. However, not every state policy reaches the national level. Previous…
This paper introduces DeepParliament, a legal domain Benchmark Dataset that gathers bill documents and metadata and performs various bill status classification tasks. The proposed dataset text covers a broad range of bills from 1986 to the…
In US State government legislatures, most of the activity occurs in committees made up of lawmakers discussing bills. When analyzing, classifying or summarizing these committee proceedings, some important features become broadly…
Modelling and analyzing parliamentary legislation, roll-call votes and order of proceedings in developed countries has received significant attention in recent years. In this paper, we focused on understanding the bills introduced in a…
Bill writing is a critical element of representative democracy. However, it is often overlooked that most legislative bills are derived, or even directly copied, from other bills. Despite the significance of bill-to-bill linkages for…
Building on developments in machine learning and prior work in the science of judicial prediction, we construct a model designed to predict the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States in a generalized, out-of-sample context. To…
Each year, the United States Congress considers thousands of legislative proposals to select bills to present to the US President to sign into law. Naturally, the decision processes of members of Congress are subject to peer influence. In…
In the U.S. Congress, legislators can use active and passive cosponsorship to support bills. We show that these two types of cosponsorship are driven by two different motivations: the backing of political colleagues and the backing of the…
Local governments around the world are making consequential decisions on behalf of their constituents, and these constituents are responding with requests, advice, and assessments of their officials at public meetings. So many small…
Populism is a concept that is often used but notoriously difficult to measure. Common qualitative measurements like holistic grading or content analysis require great amounts of time and labour, making it difficult to quickly scope out…
Automatic summarization methods have been studied on a variety of domains, including news and scientific articles. Yet, legislation has not previously been considered for this task, despite US Congress and state governments releasing tens…
Legislation can be viewed as a body of prescriptive rules expressed in natural language. The application of legislation to facts of a case we refer to as statutory reasoning, where those facts are also expressed in natural language.…
Climate policy and legislation has a significant influence on both domestic and global responses to the pressing environmental challenges of our time. The effectiveness of such climate legislation is closely tied to the complex dynamics…