OnMeasuring Legislative Agenda-Setting Power

Wepropose a typology formeasuring agenda-setting success and failure in a legislative context. Our typology goes beyond the most commonly used measure (“rolls”) and includes the full range of agenda-setting outcomes—rolls (opposing a proposal that subsequently passes), as well as “blocks ” (opposing a proposal that is subsequently defeated), “successes ” (supporting a proposal that subsequently passes), and “disappointments ” (supporting a proposal that is subsequently defeated)—and thus takes into account instances of both positive and negative agenda power. We discuss these measures, and the theoretical questions surrounding them, with the hope of providing some guidance to scholars of the U.S. House, as well as those analyzing agenda power in other legislatures. As a first step in this direction, we explore variation in agenda-setting measures in 85 American state legislative chambers, the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, and the Canadian House of Commons. As studies of legislative agenda setting originatedwith the U.S. House in mind and focused pri-marily on the majority party’s ability to exercise negative agenda control (i.e., to prevent consideration of proposals), the literature has tended to focus on “rolls” (when an agenda setter opposes a proposal that nonethe-less passes) as the appropriate measure of agenda power.1 But rolls are not the whole story when it comes to as