Updated March 7, 2001

David M. Heger
Policy Analyst
National Violence Against Women Prevention Research Center
University of Missouri—St. Louis

How to Research State Legislation

As the Internet has become more accessible and user-friendly to the average citizen, so has state government. All 50 state legislatures now offer Web sites with access to bill text and bill status. This allows anyone with a computer and a modem to review important legislation and closely monitor its progress. Some legislative Web sites provide additional features such as contact information for state lawmakers and a record of minutes from committee hearings. A few even supply live video feeds of floor deliberations between legislators. Never before has the average person had such unfiltered access to information relating to the policies that affect our lives. If utilized correctly, these tools could dramatically affect the ability of citizens to fully participate in the process of democracy.

Identifying a Proposal

The first step to monitoring state legislation is to identify a proposal or set of proposals in which you have an interest. Perhaps you already have a bill number for the legislation, and if so, you are off to a good start. Or maybe you have read a story in the local newspaper about a state policymaker who is sponsoring a bill that concerns you. (Often newspapers will report on a legislative idea without providing the corresponding bill number.) Having the sponsor's name also makes things easier once you begin to research legislation. However, the most likely scenario is that you want to follow a particular issue but possess no bill numbers or sponsor names. If this is the case, do not worry, all is not lost…

Let's assume that you are starting with nothing. Suppose you want to find out what your state is doing this year to address a particular issue–let's say domestic violence–but you are not aware of any specific legislation. First, log on to the Internet and visit your state legislature's Web site. (You can find your legislature's Web address here on the National Violence Against Women Prevention Research Center site: http://www.violenceagainstwomen.org/policy/stateleglink.shtml) Next, find the area of the legislature's site that addresses current legislation and determine whether the site offers a bill or legislation keyword search. If it does, you are in luck! Simply enter "domestic violence" into the search field and it will return all bills that address that topic. If your state's site does not have a keyword search, it will most likely provide a list of bills, arranged either by bill number or by issue area. Sorting through a list of introduced bills is a bit daunting but not quite as time consuming as one might initially suspect. Most bill lists provide a short description of each measure next to its number. In addition, you can expedite the process of locating the bills in which you have an interest by using the "Find" function on your computer (control + F on PC's and open apple + F on Macs).

If you know the name of the state lawmaker who is the primary sponsor of the bill you want to monitor, you may be able to locate the bill number by going to the section of the legislature's site that lists state representatives and senators. Often these lists provide links to the legislation that each lawmaker is sponsoring. If the site does not offer this information, you will have to sort by sponsor through the list of all legislation.

What Does the Bill Say?

Once you have identified a bill to monitor, you will want to learn more about what the legislation specifically says or attempts to accomplish. Some state legislature Web sites provide concise bill summaries, quite a blessing for non-policy wonks who are not interested in struggling through cryptic legislative code. All state sites offer public access to bill text. Because most legislation makes amendments to existing code and law, it may be beneficial to consult the state statutes, which are available on most state Web sites. Understanding legislative text is not always easy; therefore, it might be a good idea to contact the bill sponsor's office via e-mail or telephone to ask for clarification on complex provisions. Keep in mind, state lawmakers are generally very busy, and it may be more efficient to request information from staff or aides.

Understanding the Legislative Process

Legislation goes through a specific process to become law. If you want to monitor legislation, it is important to understand the process in your particular state legislature. Although most states base their lawmaking process on the federal model in Congress, each state's rules vary in small but often significant ways. To find out "how a bill becomes law" in your state visit http://www.statescape.com/Resources/Bill_to_Law/bill_to_law.asp. (This information is provided under the public section of the Web site run by StateScape, which is a private, for-profit legislative monitoring service.)

Tracking the Progress of Your Legislation

Now that you have identified legislation and familiarized yourself with the legislative process, you can begin to track the movement of your bills through the state legislature. Bill tracking is a major tool offered by most state Web sites, and it is often a very user-friendly feature. Most sites require you to enter a bill number to begin a search. The search engine will retrieve a bill record that displays the bill's status, including the most recent action or a history of all actions. It is important to understand which bill actions are significant and which ones are mostly procedural. This distinction is commonly explained in a state's "bill-to-law" summary (see above) or can be obtained by contacting the House clerk or Senate secretary in your state.

Most state legislature Web sites also offer daily journals and agendas. A journal provides a record of everything that happens during a full session of one chamber of the legislature. These are useful in gathering a sense of which bills and issues each chamber is addressing on a daily basis. Agendas provide notice for which bills are scheduled for consideration either by the full House or Senate or in a committee on a particular day. State House speakers and Senate leaders usually do not schedule bills for floor consideration more than one week in advance, likewise for committee chairs.

Putting It All Together: A Step-by-Step Example

In this example, we will be using Missouri as our state and assume that no bill has been previously identified to track. We will locate a proposal that addresses the issue of domestic violence and show you how to track the measure through a legislative session. It may be helpful to print this page and follow along on the Missouri Web site.

Step One: Locating a Bill to Follow

We begin at the main Web page for the Missouri General Assembly, which is comprised of the State House and Senate. (http://www.moga.state.mo.us/) From this page, there is a link called "Bill Tracking Information," which takes us to a tracking service that provides information on bills from both the House and Senate. The Joint Bill Tracking page lists four options: "Keyword Search," "Bill Number Search," "Subject Index," and "Sponsor/Co-sponsor Search." Because in this example we are assuming no access to a bill number or sponsor's name, we choose the link to search by keyword. We enter the keyword "domestic violence" and press "Search," which returns 30 matches. (The number of matches refers to documents, not individual bills.) From this list, we randomly select SB 571, which is legislation that provides money for domestic violence shelters.

Step Two: Understanding the Legislation

Now that we have chosen a bill to follow, we will want to know what this legislation is all about. From the page that returned 30 matches to the search term "domestic violence," we click on the link for SB 571, and it takes us to a page that provides a wide range of information on the measure. The current bill summary, provided at the bottom of the page, informs us that SB 571 requires a portion of marriage license fees "to be forwarded to the Director of the Department of Public Safety for distribution" to domestic violence shelters. The summary does not say whether this is new money or just a new method for distributing money to shelters.

Fortunately, the page provides a link to the bill text for SB 571. On the Missouri Web site, existing statutes within bill text are shown in regular font, new provisions are shown in bold lettering, and deleted text is blocked in parenthesis. Close examination of the bill text indicates that marriage license fees in Missouri are currently distributed to shelters via county treasurers. This legislation proposes to reroute fee money earmarked for shelters through the state. On the surface this appears to be a mere technicality, but local media reported last year that county governments in some instances were failing to distribute the full amount due shelters from license fees. The moral of the story here is that legislative research often calls for investigation beyond a reading of bill summaries and text.

Step Three: Understanding the Process

Before we can begin to monitor the progress of SB 571, we need to familiarize ourselves with the lawmaking process in Missouri. We go to the StateScape Web site to find our state's "bill-to-law" document. (http://www.statescape.com/Resources/Bill_to_Law/bill_to_law.asp) The link for Missouri takes us to a page titled "How a Bill Becomes a Law," which provides a concise summary for the legislative process in the state. This document helps us understand what specifically must happen in order for SB 571to become law.

Step Four: Tracking the Proposal

Now we can track SB 571 through its journey to enactment. Going back to the Web page for SB 571 (http://www.house.state.mo.us/bills01/bills01/sb571.htm), we see that there is a "Last Action", or most current action, listed for the bill and a link to "All Actions", which provides a history of the measure's progress, to date. As of March 7, 2001, the last action for SB 571 was a second reading and referral to the Senate Local Government & Economic Development Committee. What does this mean? By referring to our bill-to-law document we can see that being read for the second time is just something that happens to a bill in Missouri before it is placed in a committee for consideration. Our bill still has to go through committee, perfection, and votes by the full Senate and full House.

SB 571 is just at the beginning of the legislative process and it has a long way to go in the two months before the General Assembly adjourns for the year. Does this mean that the bill has no chance of becoming law in 2001? Not necessarily, but the state Web site does not provide such information. To obtain this kind of intelligence, we would have to contact someone familiar with the chances of passage for SB 571. The bill's sponsor and the chair of the committee where the bill sits are good people to question about a bill's viability. These people will usually be very frank with constituents about who is in favor of a bill and who is against it and what must happen for a particular bill to become law. They are also typically interested to know how voters and advocates feel about the measures that are pending in the legislature.

And Finally…

Monitoring state legislation can be a fruitful and mostly painless endeavor once you become comfortable with your state's Internet resources. Whether your aim is to simply make your individual voice heard by your representatives or to lobby on behalf of an interest group, researching legislation and policy on the Web makes for more informed and effective participation in the state lawmaking process.