Though it is certainly not the only task of legislators, the effective drafting, revision, and passage of bills is a critical activity on which they may be evaluated. This chapter employs a basic measure of legislative achievement that can be used to judge the performance of particular members or the house as a whole. It looks at the percentage of bills introduced that actually become law. Especially in transformative legislatures, the distribution of achievement across different types of members – patterns in who is able to pass their bills – becomes an interesting phenomenon. I explore both aggregate and individual legislative achievement here and discover several clear and consistent effects.

There are some obvious ways in which features of a legislature's design might affect levels of achievement. Supermajoritarian voting rules should make it harder for all members to move legislation but benefit the moderates in the minority whose support must be courted. Rules that grant committee chairs the ability to bury bills without a hearing may present obstacles to all legislators and certainly disadvantage the factions unpopular with chairs. Although their influence may be less evident, term limits and professionalism can also be plausibly linked both to levels of legislative achievement and to the distribution of policy-making performance. The imposition of limits and the bolstering of a house's professionalism may directly affect how successful all members are at achieving their legislative goals.