Status Quo Policies. The primary obstacle to testing predictions of spatial models is the difficulty that in- heres in identifying status quo policies and locating outcomes in policy space. To test the predictions of separation of powers models that assume there are statutes in place that govern policy in a particular issue area when Congress decides whether or not to enact legislation, it is necessary to identify the status quo policy (or policies) and then to as- sess the location of that policy in the same ideological space in which the preferences of the relevant actors are measured. One approach to identifying status quo policies would be to discern the primary topic of a xxxx and then to identify the most recent xxxx passed (prior to the newly proposed xxxx) addressing the same topic. The most recently passed xxxx addressing the same topic would be the status quo policy. The Policy Agendas Project (Xxxxxxxxxxx & Xxxxx 2008) codes bills by their primary topic. Each xxxx is coded into one of nineteen major topics and 225 subtopics. These data could be used to match proposed legislation to recent enactments by issue area. This approach, however, would ignore an important reality about the modern legislative process—many statutes affect multiple, and often unrelated, policy domains. Accordingly, I adopt a more precise method to iden- tify status quo policies based on the sections of the United States Code that a proposed xxxx would modify. The United States Code “is the codification by subject matter of the general and per- manent laws of the United States.” It is divided into fifty titles which deal with broad, log- ically organized areas of legislation. The U.S. Code is maintained by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives which determines which statutes in the United States Statutes at Large should be codified and which existing statutes are affected by amendments, repeals, or expirations and updates the Code accordingly. The U.S. Code, then, can be used to identify what laws are in effect in an issue area at any given time. Within each of the titles of the U.S. Code, provisions are further divided into Chapters, Subchapters, and Sections. The U.S. Code reports the dates of modification to each section. Proposed legislation generally indicates the changes the statute would make to the U.S. Code by section. I rely on the text of a xxxx to identify the sections of the U.S. Code it would modify and the U.S. code itself to identify the most...
