Designing Data Products

As a part of our final project, we aim to analyze the likelihood of a Congress Bill to be passed given a set of variables.

Understanding the increasingly important process of forming regulations and laws in the country, we decided to explore the possibility in determining the likelihood of a proposed bill being passed by the House. This exercise can be useful for lobbyists, corporations in formulating political strategies, or even the general public during voting periods.

Problem Statement:

To discover relevant factors that can help to predict the likelihood of a Bill being passed in the House

Dataset used in this exercise comes from ProPublica

Member - Details of Congresspeople in the House in each session with supporting information on leanings, gender, time served on the House

Bills - Details on the bills originating in the House in each session with supporting information on policy areas, sponsor, cosponsors, date of introduction, outcome of bill etc.

Feature Vectors

Policy area
Is the bill introduced by a Congressperson from the majority house?
Number of cosponsors
% of cosponsors from the majority house
Is the sponsor in a leadership role?
Political leaning of the sponsor dwNominate Seniority of the sponsor
% of votes against the party (sponsor)

Using the different models and optimization methods, we produced the following result:

Main Findings

By observing the best model, we can draw several key insights as follows:

Higher polarization leads to a higher success/fail rate of passing a bill
Number of cosponsors in majority help in passing a bill
Certain policy areas have higher likelihood of being passed (i.e. National Security, Emergency Management, etc.)

Use cases

Law Firms and Clients - Consider a world where law firms are able to reach out to their clients and alert them that a bill is more likely to pass and explain how it would impact their business.

Corporations & Lobbyists - Our model has the ability to recreate how companies interact with Washington, helping them make decisions about investing efforts in the political process.

Societal Impact - Citizens will have the ability to stay informed about important bills impacting their personal lives like health and employment related bills. Political outcomes can be volatile and impact financial markets. Using our model, the prediction can promote stability.