Announcing the Release of the 113th Tennessee General Assembly (2023-2024) State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES)
The Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) is proud to announce the release of our State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES) for the 113th Tennessee General Assembly (2023-2024) legislative session. This initiative is part of our broader effort to measure the lawmaking effectiveness of individual legislators in all 99 state legislative chambers in the United States.
These scores capture lawmaking effectiveness by tracking the number of bills legislators sponsor, how far those bills advance through the legislative process, and the substantive significance of the proposals.
With the release of Tennessee, our state-level data initiative continues to grow—building on earlier reports from Montana and Georgia. Additional states will be added in the coming months as we work toward full national coverage.
Highlights from the Tennessee SLES Report (2023–2024):
- Top Performers: We identify the top 10 most effective Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the House, the top 10 most effective Republican lawmakers and the top 3 most effective Democratic lawmakers in the Senate, including legislators who have consistently ranked as highly effective lawmakers across multiple legislative sessions.
- Above Expectations: We highlight legislators who earned our prestigious Above Expectations designation for lawmaking effectiveness, including both experienced legislators with sustained records and first-term lawmakers who quickly distinguished themselves among their peers.
- Majority Party Advantage: Consistent with CEL research, majority-party legislators were generally more effective lawmakers, reflecting structural advantages such as agenda-setting power and committee leadership.
- Tennessee Findings: In terms of broader patterns, the lawmaking power of committee chairs is not used as extensively to advance self-sponsored legislation in the Tennessee General Assembly relative to most other states. As such, the enhanced lawmaking effectiveness of committee chairs was relatively small in Tennessee in the 2023-2024 term. For example, the average SLES of committee chairs in the House for 2023-2024 was 1.39, the lowest level for committee chairs since the beginning of our data in 1995. This translates to the average committee chair producing less than 6 laws each, compared to nearly 13 laws per committee chair back in 2011-2012. A similar pattern emerges in the Senate. The average SLES for chairs of 1.09 in 2023-2024 is not noticeably different from an average member of the majority party. On average, Senate committee chairs produced about 26 laws each from their sponsored bills in 2023-2024, compared to a 24-law average for other Republicans. This points to a legislative process in which ideas for legislative solutions to policy problems come from a wide variety of members.
You can explore the full report and detailed findings below:
