How does the Legislator Effectiveness Score work?

FiscalNote's Legislator Effectiveness score represents how often they pass their sponsored legislation in a given topic area relative to their peers in their chamber. Despite the limitations, we think this is a fair, albeit incomplete, assessment of how good the legislator is at advancing their agenda through sponsored legislation.

FiscalNote's Legislator Pages show that legislator's Effectiveness Score by topic area

Please keep in mind this score does not represent how effective they are at serving in their capacity as an elected official—many legislators may accomplish a great deal by being highly influential with their peers or by preventing others from enacting legislation. Additionally, much of a legislator's work is behind the scenes, and we can only account for recorded activity.

A simplified explanation of how we calculate the Legislator Effectiveness Score is the following:

1. Break down each legislator's bill sponsorship activity into individual steps, such as how many bills sponsored, how often those bills get out of committee, and so on.
2. Split up bills by their topic areas
3. Combine the scores by bill type in a weighted manner and then translate to a simple, 0–10 scale

Lastly, in addition to using this information on the Legislator Page itself, you may also use the Effectiveness Score to filter through legislators in the Legislator Search page by clicking on Effectiveness at the left, clicking Select Category, and then picking the Category and Effectiveness ranking.