How can voters measure how good or bad their congressional representatives are at their jobs?

It’s a surprisingly hard question to answer, one that two professors have spent more than a decade trying to figure out.

Alan E. Wiseman, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, and Craig Volden, a University of Virginia professor of public policy and politics, are co-directors of the Center of Effective Lawmaking, a joint project of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University, Wiseman and Volden are also the authors of the 2014 book, “Legislative Effectiveness in the U.S. Congress.”“We were trying to understand why some members of Congress are more successful of advancing their agenda or legislation in Congress,” Wiseman said. “In workshopping the book, people were presenting us with all sorts of interesting questions.”

The Southern California News Group has attempted to objectively measure how effective local legislators are in their jobs in both Washington and Sacramento for almost a decade.

But no single measurement can tell the whole story.

“There’s lots and lots of things that lawmakers do that they and their constituents value,” Wiseman said, including legislators’ work overseeing the federal government and constituent services.

Bills signed

Probably the easiest way to measure effectiveness is tallying the number of bills introduced by a legislator and how many were signed into law.

Members of Congress representing Southern California voters were more likely than the average to get bills passed in the previous session of Congress.

In the 117th session of Congress, which ran from Jan. 3, 2021 through Jan. 3, 2023, 7% of introduced bills were signed into law, according to an analysis by GovTrack.us, a nonpartisan website that tracks congressional data. (The data includes bills that later were absorbed into larger bills.)

That’s about average.Since the 93rd Congress, which ended Dec. 20, 1974, 5.88% of bills introduced became law, according to GovTrack.us data. Individual sessions range between a 4% and 9% rate of bills becoming law.

In the 21st century, about two-thirds of the bills signed have been nonbinding resolutions, voicing support or opposition to something, rather than setting the law of the land.

Representatives in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties got 11.98% of the bills they introduced signed into law in the 117th Congress, according to a new Southern California News Group analysis. California’s senators, Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla, got 5.04% of the bills they introduced passed.

Southern California members of Congress doing better than average in the 117th Congress isn’t a surprise to Marcia Godwin, a professor of public administration at the University of La Verne.

“The House is a majoritarian institution, meaning that the predominantly Democratic California delegation would have been expected to do relatively well in the last Congress,” where Democrats were in control, Godwin said in an email. “There also have been seasoned members like (Corona Republican) Ken Calvert who served as the highest ranking Republican member on a key subcommittee and may have been able to collaborate on bipartisan legislation.”

In contrast, an SCNG analysis published in October showed that 37% of legislation introduced in the California Assembly and 44% of all legislation introduced in the state Senate in the most recent two-year session were signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Quality of bills

Still, the number of bills signed into law isn’t everything.

“Effectiveness is more than sponsoring bills,” according to Godwin.

She pointed to Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-San Bernardino, now the third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives. During the 117th Congress, Aguilar introduced 12 bills, none of which became law.

“(He) was doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work with the Democratic leadership. It is also hard to fault him for being part of a group that has tried to work with a bipartisan group on immigration reform,” Godwin said. “Constituent services, influencing amendments, shaping media coverage of Congress, basic committee effectiveness, reputation, staff turnover, and fundraising for other candidates all feed into perceptions of job performance.”

The quality of bills passed matters more than quantity, Aguilar argues. He specifically pointed to the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the domestic manufacturing CHIPS and Science Act, the bipartisan gun safety bill and the Inflation Reduction Act.

“If you would have done one of those bills in a two-year session, you would have said, ‘this is amazing, this is great,’ ” Aguilar said. “We did five.”

Jack Pitney, a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College, agreed.

“It’s not just the batting average of signed bills, but the significance of the legislation itself. One major reform of veteran benefits is far more important than dozens of bills to rename post offices,” he said in an email.

In addition, lawmakers helping to stop bad bills from being passed is “arguably just as important” as passing good ones, Pitney said.

Wiseman’s and Volden’s Center of Effective Lawmaking calculates a legislative effectiveness score for members of Congress, combining the quality and quantity of bills introduced, along with how far those bills get in the legislative process.

“There’s lots of intermediary successes that occur in the legislative process,” Wiseman said. “These intermediate stages are quite meaningful.”

Getting part of the way with bills in one session of Congress translates into getting more bills passed in future sessions, according to Wiseman.

Other revelations from the center’s data: In addition to the benefits of being a member of the majority party, seniority and being a committee chair, Wiseman said the center’s research shows that legislators are more successful if they have relationships with members of the opposing party in Congress as well as having their own focused policy agenda.

“We wanted to come up with some metric that captured some of the major legislative hurdles in the process,” Wiseman said, which led to the development of the legislative effectiveness score.

The score analyzes more than a dozen data points, including how far bills move through the legislative process and the significance of the policy proposals.

In the 117th Congress, members of the minority Republican Party in the House had an average LES of 0.58 while members of the majority Democratic Party had an average LES of 1.40, reflecting that it was easier for Democrats to get more done when they controlled the House. Committee chairs had an average score of 2.55.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, minority Republican members had an average score of 0.77, majority Democrat members had an average score of 1.23 and committee chairs had an average score of 1.51.

The average score for House members in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties was 1.44. California’s two senators had an average score of 1.369.

Money sent to districts

In addition to their work on policy, legislators often back direct aid to their districts. The earmarks process is another important measure of legislators’ effectiveness, according to Pitney.

“Though earmarks got a bad reputation because of past abuses, they are usually sensible vehicles for delivering help to communities that need it,” he said.

The Bipartisan Policy Center itemized the local spending in the 2021 spending bill, looking at who requested which earmark. The average Southern California member of the House requested $12.1 million in earmarks in that bill, ranging from $26.9 million brought home by Rep. Julia Brownley, D-Thousand Oaks, to zero for Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, and Rep. Katie Porter, D-Irvine, neither of whom had any earmarks in the final version of the bill, according to the center’s data.

Constituent services

Finally, members of Congress helping residents of their districts — known as constituent services — is seen as incredibly important in many communities. The services often include things like helping constituents navigate problems with federal agencies, including the Social Security, Small Business or Veterans Administration.

“Voters of color really put a lot of value on constituent services,” said Christian Grose, a professor of political science and public policy at USC. He wrote a book on the subject, “Congress in Black and White.”

Quantifying how well members of Congress are doing in constituent services is hard, he said.

“The congressional style is more contingent on who’s in the district — do they focus on passing legislation or constituent services,” Grose said.