Last year, the Ohio General Assembly made fewer new laws than it had in any year since 1955. The sixteen laws passed in 2023 beat out the previous record holder, 2009, when Democrats controlled the Ohio House and were only able to agree with the Republican Ohio Senate on 17 new laws.
There are a lot of political explanations for why so few bills became laws in Ohio last year. It may be because of the fractured Republican leadership in the Ohio House. It may be because so much of policymaking happens in the state budget rather than in individual bills. It may be that polarization has led to less common ground between legislators.
When I hear about a statistic like this, the question that comes to mind to me is this: why does it matter? The most straightforward answer to this question is that Ohio is still facing many issues that public policy could be the answer for.
Whether it’s the opioid epidemic, food insecurity in both urban and Appalachian Ohio, low water quality in Ohio’s streams and rivers, or economic prospects in post-industrial cities, Ohio has no shortage of problems. And public policy could be the answer to these problems.
The nice thing about “number of bills enacted into law” is that it is a specific, measurable statistic. It definitely tells us something about the body and its political tenor, though it is debatable what exactly it is telling us.
But if we want to evaluate the question of how much good the general assembly is doing for the state of Ohio, we’d want to evaluate it differently. Theoretically, the state could cram a bunch of policy into a single budget bill that improves Ohioans’ lives considerably, passing one law but doing lots of good for its residents.
At the federal level, regulations are evaluated using cost-benefit analysis. Every regulation that may have a $100 million impact on the national economy is subject to cost-benefit analysis to assess the impact of the regulation on the public. These cost-benefit analyses are released in a federal report every year that talk about the overall impact on regulations on the U.S. economy.
In the spirit of this approach, I’ll put forth some metrics that we could ideally use to assess the effectiveness of the Ohio General Assembly.
How much will new laws grow the statewide economy? Normally, we’d measure this as a change in gross domestic product. Ideally, we would measure this using a comprehensive economic indicator like the Genuine Progress Indicator that captures the external impacts of economic activity, informal markets that aren’t captured in standard measures, and time markets where people trade off their valuable time for things they want.
How much will new laws reduce poverty and inequality? Impacts on poverty could be measured using more comprehensive, mainstream poverty indicators like the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which makes geographic adjustments for cost of living and includes the value of benefits. Impacts on inequality can be assessed by seeing how laws change the distribution of income.
How much will new laws foster human development? This means using measures like income, years of schooling, and life expectancy to see how much laws are improving people’s abilities to live the lives they want to live.
Finally, are laws improving how people evaluate their own lives? This means utilizing surveys of people’s well-being such as used in the World Happiness Report to evaluate public policy changes.
Ultimately, the way to evaluate policymakers is not on how many laws they pass, but on how these laws improve the lives of their residents. Having think tanks, analysts, and journalists focusing on these questions will give us the best picture of how well the Ohio General Assembly is performing.
This commentary first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal.