A text-as-data approach to measuring the policy influence of policy bureaucracies

Although, in parliamentary democracies, almost all bills are initiatives of the executive or the governing parties, few are passed without legislative amendments. However, we know surprisingly little about the substantive relevance of these amendments. Due to the asymmetry in expertise and resources in executive-legislative relations, policy bureaucracies, where most bills are drafted, have potentially strong influence on the substance of policies. While this potential policy influence of policy bureaucracies in policy formulation is barely contested, it is only an emerging research topic. Complementing recent text-as-data research on the role of interest group lobbying and coalition politics in legislative amendments, this paper focuses on the substantive policy influence of policy bureaucracies. Based on a novel dataset of legislative processes in Germany 2013-2022, this draft paper develops a new approach to measuring ministerial policy influence based on the substance of policy drafts. The measure accounts for the origin of policies, the substantive relevance of the proposed policy change and amendments throughout the legislative process. For this purpose, natural language processing is applied to classify the content of policy proposals by their substantive relevance and to track legislative amendments throughout the policy formulation process. Initial evidence suggests that ministerial policy influence varies significantly between policies and ministries. To explain this variance in policy influence, this draft paper reflects on potential explanatory factors on the policy and organizational levels as well as avenues for future research. It thus contributes to understanding executive-legislative relations in parliamentary democracies.