Zach Stednick

This is my second post looking at the data from the 2017-18 Washington State Legislative Session. the first part of this blog can be read here

After some time looking at different bills that did pass, I started to wonder if a bill was more likely to pass if it had more sponsors. First I took the 647 bills passed by the Legislation and signed into law by Governor and looked up how many co-sponsors each bill had:

Then I I took every bill that was introduced but did not become law and counted up the sponsors for these:

So it appears that the number of sponsors is not particulary predictive for a bill becoming law. The three bills introduced in the Senate with the highest number of Sponsors were:

Bill	Sponsor count	Summary
5598	40	Granting relatives, including but not limited to grandparents, the right to seek visitation with a child through the courts.
6037	28	Concerning the uniform parentage act.
5375	27	Renaming the cancer research endowment authority to the Andy Hill cancer research endowment.

And in the House:

Bill	Sponsor count	Summary
2282	52	Protecting an open internet in Washington state.
1714	45	Concerning nursing staffing practices at hospitals.
1400	42	Creating Washington state aviation special license plates.

In November 2017, Manka Dhingra won a special election and the Washington State Senate flipped from Republican held to Democrat held. Initially I wanted to focus on the number of bills passed by a Republican held Senate versus a Democrat held Senate but there were too many extraneous variables such as passing a budget and a shorter session in 2018. Instead, I decided to focus on the number of Yea votes by bill

Many of the bills passed were with almost overwhelming support, which is refreshing to see that there is quite a bit of bipartisanship in Washington State in 2018.

As always, analysis code on GitHub