preprints.apsanet.org
Divided We Legislate: How Party Conflict Shapes Legislative Design
Though research on elite party conflict has long emphasized its effect on legislative productivity and outcomes, little attention has been paid to how these dynamics shape the design of legislation itself. We investigate how partisan conflict relates to two key dimensions of legislative design: versatility, the breadth of provisions; and precision, their clarity and specificity. Using the full text of all 44,346 public laws enacted by the U.S. Congress from 1873 to 2025 (43rd–118th Congresses), we combine original sentence-level measures of legislative design derived from large language models with a measure of partisan conflict in congressional speech. Partisan conflict is associated with more precise legislation, an association that has strengthened in the modern era. That pattern reverses where passage has most at stake: among must-pass laws, and in the contested domains of omnibus legislation, higher conflict accompanies vaguer and more narrowly drawn provisions.
