Craig Volden on Effective Lawmaking, Policy Diffusion, and the Science of Politics

If politics is often described as messy, intuitive, and driven by personalities, Craig Volden has spent his career asking what happens when you treat it instead as something measurable. Trained first as an engineer and later as a political scientist, Volden approaches public policy with a scientist’s instinct: break large questions into testable parts, gather data, and let the evidence reveal patterns that conventional wisdom often misses.
As co-founder of the Center for Effective Lawmaking and a leading scholar of policy diffusion, Volden has built some of the most ambitious attempts to quantify how legislation actually moves—from initial idea to enacted law. His work tracks why some policies spread across states while others stall, what makes certain lawmakers consistently effective, and how institutional incentives shape what ultimately becomes public policy. Beneath the statistics lies a deeper question: how do ideas survive the realities of coalition-building, party politics, and institutional constraints long enough to shape people’s lives?
In this conversation, Volden reflects on his unlikely path from engineering to political science, the construction of legislative “effectiveness” metrics used by scholars and practitioners alike, and what decades of data reveal about bipartisanship, specialization, and institutional capacity in American governance. He also offers candid advice for students navigating their own intellectual paths: sample widely, specialize deliberately, and treat discomfort as a signal for growth rather than retreat.
At a moment when public discourse often emphasizes dysfunction, Volden makes the case that much of the most consequential policy work still happens quietly—and that understanding how it happens requires treating politics not just as debate, but as a craft that can be studied, measured, and improved.

-Craig Volden is a professor at the University of Virginia and co-founder of the Center for Effective Lawmaking

From engineering to political science
Ben Wolf: If you had to describe your career as a single problem that you’ve been trying to solve, what is it—and what originally pulled you toward it?
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Craig Volden: Thanks for asking, and thanks for having me here today. I’ve been—early on—on a bit of a winding path.
I grew up in North Dakota and went to college pretty far from there, up at Caltech, to study aeronautical engineering. From there, I decided I wasn’t that excited about that topic. But I also learned at Caltech that political science could be treated as a science.
In other words, the way they approached it there—political scientists were asking questions that led them to form a hypothesis, gather data, test those hypotheses, and so on. I found that tremendous because I’ve always had this science-y background, but I was drawn to political science and public policy questions.
From there, I transferred up to Stanford and stayed there for grad school, and then I had a winding path as a new professor—University of Chicago, Claremont Graduate University, Ohio State, University of Michigan, and finally here at the University of Virginia.
The questions I’m drawn to are: why do we have the public policies that we have? Those policies affect a lot of people’s lives, and I’m interested in the politics behind them.
That led me to big questions like: if one state or locality adopts a policy and it’s working really well, does it spread elsewhere—what we call policy diffusion?
And more recently: if somebody has a good idea in a legislature, what can they do to advance it? What does it take to be an effective lawmaker? That latter question led me to co-found the Center for Effective Lawmaking, which studies and promotes effective lawmaking in Congress and the state legislatures.
I enjoy the academic career and being a professor, but simultaneously, the ability to interact with members of Congress, their staff, state legislators, and the good-governance community—that’s really exciting. It feeds back into new hypotheses to test with new data.

Where the research goes next
BW: When you think about your work right now—the questions you’ve answered in the past and the questions you’re answering now—where do you see that leading you in the future? Do you imagine you’ll continue investigating these questions, or is there a broader goal you’re working toward?

CV: When we set up the Center for Effective Lawmaking, that was in 2017, and we were almost exclusively focused on Congress. We found a way to score every member of Congress—who are the effective lawmakers—and use those scores as a research design to ask: what could someone do to become more effective?
Over the past few years, we’ve been in a position to pivot to the states, too. So now we’re studying state legislators, scoring them for effectiveness, and using the variance across institutions to ask: why are folks in Louisiana different than folks in Virginia, and what are their patterns for how they come up with solutions to public policy problems?
It’s tremendously exciting. Is it the same questions? Sort of, because it’s still about effective lawmaking. But now we’re studying 50 states and 99 chambers instead of the two in Congress.

BW: I interviewed Congressman Suhas Subramanyam once before—he’s in Virginia’s 10th District, funny enough. Do you recall off the top of your head how his score was?

CV: Especially now that we have thousands and thousands of lawmakers at the state level, I don’t recall any particular one particularly well.
But what we do on our website, thelawmakers.org, is put all the data up there. For Congress, the scores go back 50 years, so you can see big trends—what’s been going on in your district. Did you have a really effective lawmaker, and is the current one living up to that standard? A lot of people enjoy poking around there.

How the scoring works
BW: Could you tell me a little bit more about how the scoring works—what goes into the equation? In high school, I remember creating a statistical metric to measure an NBA team's effectiveness in drafting players, which proved to be much more complex then I originally thought. I can't imagine what goes into yours.

CV: We care about lawmaking, so we set aside other important activities: oversight, constituency service, how much funding you bring back to your district. Those matter, but we’re focused on lawmaking.
We start with the bills that can become law. For a member of Congress, we look at how many bills they introduce—and then how far those bills move through the lawmaking process. Do they get action in committee—like a hearing, a markup, a subcommittee vote? Do they get to the floor of the House or Senate? Do they pass their home chamber? Do they become law?
Each of those is a rarer activity, and rarer activities we rate more highly. You get a tiny boost for introducing a bill, but a big boost for a law.
Then we know not all laws are the same. If it’s naming a post office—commemorative stuff—we downgrade those. But if you’re tackling immigration reform or other major issues of the day, you get upgraded for taking on major issues.
And one thing we found in Congress—and it’s starting to take place in the states as well—is that individual bills matter, but now they’re often putting together these giant packages, whether it’s a “one big, beautiful bill” or a major omnibus budget bill that includes a lot of provisions.
So we want to give people credit if they have ideas that are incorporated into those bigger laws. We’re at universities, so we use plagiarism-style software: we take the text of any bill and the text of every law and compare them. If there’s a lot of overlap, we want to give members credit for their ideas finding their way into law.
It has a little of everything going on there, but it captures what we’re interested in.

Limits, improvements, and staying in your lane
BW: When I built that metric I mentionned, we admitted there were things it couldn’t capture—like draft-day trades. Kobe Bryant was drafted by the Hornets but spent his career with the Lakers. Are there “trade”-type issues with your statistic—things you’re looking at now and saying, “We need to account for that”?

CV: Our major one was exactly what I just mentioned—so much language is embedded in other bills. That was an innovation we adopted just a few years ago, even though we released our first scores in 2014.
It’s helpful to have that mindset: I like what we’re doing, but if there are opportunities to do it better, let’s improve.
We use these scores for research on what it takes to become an effective lawmaker, and then we try to convey that to members of Congress, state legislators, their staff, and the good-governance community. We get feedback, which is wonderful.
Some feedback is: capture these bigger bills. Other feedback is: it would be great to have scorecards for oversight, or for how well they communicate with constituents.
I agree—those are important parts of what a legislator does. But since we’re focused on lawmaking, we try to stay in our lane.

Recruitment, parties, and what “winning” means
BW: Another part of what you’re doing seems organizational: parties want to put together a team—committee chairs, party leaders, and so on. How much does effective lawmaking factor into that?

CV: One research project we’re taking on right now is to try to figure out: who recruited these members of Congress to run?
If we can identify the ones getting a lot of support from political parties—through campaign contributions and so on—we might be able to say: that’s who the party was recruiting. And are they recruiting people likely to be highly effective lawmakers, or are they recruiting people who will vote with the party no matter what?
We don’t know the answer yet, but it seems valuable. It’s like putting together a team you want to succeed—what does “succeed” mean? What’s your strategy?

Trends over time: bipartisanship and specialization
BW: Looking back at the past 40 years of lawmakers, what interesting trends have you noticed? Are they more effective now than they were in the past—or vice versa?

CV: We’ve found patterns that are really consistent over time.
One is: you can look at who you attract as co-sponsors. Some members of Congress are really about partisan issues—they advance everything on behalf of Democrats or Republicans—while others are more bipartisan.
People talk about the loss of bipartisanship today, but there are very few members of Congress who don’t have at least some degree of bipartisanship in their co-sponsors.
The most effective lawmakers attract about 40% of their co-sponsors from the other party. That’s a strong signal that the idea has been worked on, refined, and supported across parties—and if you’re including things in a bigger package, or if you’re a committee chair deciding what to spend time on, these are bills where the homework has been done.
That was true 40 years ago; it’s true today. But co-sponsorship across parties has declined: it used to be about 30–40%, and now it’s more like 20–30%. Not as extreme as the public might think, but it is on the decline, which is unfortunate.
Another consistent pattern: the most effective members of Congress specialize. They might put forward half of their bills in one issue area—environment, health care, and so on—and become known as the person who knows that topic inside and out.
That specialization mattered 40 years ago, and it matters today. But members of Congress are becoming more generalists over time, scattering legislation across many issues.
In part, that’s based on committee structure and congressional capacity—party leaders are taking the lead on legislation instead of committee chairs. Without strong specialization incentives—“this is your committee; build expertise; move it forward”—members become more generalist, which, in many ways, doesn’t help the lawmaking process.

What the public misses about policy
BW: More broadly, what do you think people most misunderstand about how policy actually gets made in the U.S.?

CV: A lot of people think nothing gets done. That’s definitely not true.
It’s easier to tell a story about what’s contentious—partisan politics and people yelling at each other—than the story about the work that’s being done, often behind the scenes. People miss a lot of what Congress is doing.
Likewise for state legislatures: many people misunderstand their rules and how they work. If a policy isn’t being accomplished by Congress, there are ways states can step in, and they have on a variety of issues. A lot of that flies under the radar.
So yes: there are major public policy problems not yet being addressed—that’s fair. But there are also many areas where we’ve made substantial progress, and not many people notice it.

Turning “messy” politics into measurable research
BW: What’s your personal method for translating a big, messy political question into something measurable without losing the main point?

CV: It depends on the question. But our starting question was: are there some members of Congress—some state legislators—who are better at their lawmaking jobs than others?
That felt big, so we said: let’s define what lawmaking is, and define what “being good at it” is.
That led us to: laws come from bills, and bills progress through a process. We can capture that.
We didn’t want to go with just what’s easy to measure. But we did want to be objective and not put our thumbs on the scale.
The numbers themselves show patterns—like: it helps to be in the majority party, it helps to be a committee chair, it helps to be senior. But we didn’t want to give someone a higher score simply because they’re in the majority party. We wanted the objective measures to reveal those patterns.
So it’s about being objective, breaking the question into small parts, and bringing it all together.

The fork in the road
BW: I want to turn back to your career path and conclude with advice for students. When you look back, what was the pivotal fork-in-the-road moment—something that looked small at the time but changed your trajectory?

CV: One was the realization that political science could be a science. That was crucial for me because I loved science, and I loved public policy questions.

BW: When you say “realization,” what did that actually look like?

CV: If I look back at my high school government class, it was memorization—facts, dates, storytelling. It wasn’t something I was drawn to in terms of data and hypotheses.
Then in college, around your age, I ran across classes where it really was government as political science—as: there’s a bunch we don’t know; how can we figure it out?
For lawmaking: how can we measure who an effective lawmaker is? Is it better to be a generalist or a specialist? How important are congressional staff in getting things done? What issues are more gridlocked than others?
Those questions sound like: develop hypotheses, gather data, detect concepts like bipartisanship, issue specialization, gridlock—and test.

Generalist vs. specialist: advice for students
BW: You mentioned weighing generalist versus specialist in the context of lawmakers earlier. Students weigh that too—especially those interested in government, think tanks, research, writing. Should they build breadth across fields, or specialize? And if they specialize, how do they decide?

CV: Absolutely—a tough question. It’s something I struggled with early on.
I think the answer is: sample a lot until you’re sure.
If you only know one thing, you won’t build that many connections. But if you’re only an inch deep, that won’t work either.
In the early days, when you’re deciding between history, political science, public policy, engineering—don’t run far down one path until you’ve had experience with a bunch of them.
Universities force some of that through general education requirements. But I’d say the same for clubs: don’t make them all the same. If you can do an internship or a summer job, don’t repeat last year’s—try something else.
Eventually you’ll say: I loved that—and I know why I loved that. You notice patterns: “In all my papers and classes, I keep getting pulled toward environmental policy.” When you know it, you see it.
And there’s no failure here. There’s learning: “I didn’t like that work environment.” Great—why? How do you avoid it? “I didn’t care for domestic topics; I’m drawn to international ones.” Wonderful—because it helps you set a path.
Once you know your path, you’ll naturally build expertise and knowledge around it.

What successful students have in common
BW: As we conclude: you’ve been a professor for many years, and you’ve seen students go on to lead successful, meaningful careers. When you think about those students, what traits, skills, or habits do you think led them there?

CV: Traits and habits can be established over time. It’s not like you’re born “successful” or not.
Students face things that are tricky and difficult for them—and the more difficult it is, probably the more you should go down that road.
If you’re not comfortable as a public speaker, force yourself to get in front of groups and make speeches. If you’re not comfortable with math and data, take classes that make you comfortable.
So: get out of your comfort zone, have a growth mindset, and keep trying things.
The most successful students become lifelong learners. The question is: how do you set yourself up so that after college, you can still learn?
The world is full of opportunities—online and in person—to learn skills. The challenge is identifying what will be hard to learn on your own, and learning that while you have structure and support.
For many students, that’s methods: working with data, econ classes, that kind of infrastructure. Learn it in a group, in an institutional setting, while you’re here—even if it’s tough.
Some substantive knowledge—something you’d love to take a class on—if it doesn’t fit your schedule, there will be opportunities to learn it later. You’re not done learning when you leave.

A book recommendation
BW: Finally, Professor Volden, If you had to recommend a single book for a student interested in your work, what would it be—and why?

CV: Rudely and supportingly, we do have a book that came out early on called Legislative Effectiveness in the U.S. Congress: The Lawmakers—so, buy the book.
But if you’re interested in effective lawmaking, I’d also say: start on our website, thelawmakers.org. Click around. Look at the working papers, what we’re doing now, and the projects we have going on.
We have a lot of interviews with effective lawmakers. They might not be as compelling as what Ben’s putting together, but it’s our attempt to highlight some of the good work being done in the states and in Congress.
And of course: look up the scores for your lawmakers.

BW: I’ll be sure to check out those scores. Professor Volden, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a real honor.
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CV: Great to talk to you.