This page shows the results of an independent Act on Mass investigation into laws enacted by the Massachusetts legislature since 1997, the first year for which a record is available on the legislature’s website. The data analysis was completed in R by Act on Mass executive director Scotia Hille.
Written analysis can be found in an op-ed published in the Commonwealth Beacon: Omnibus bills enable opaque lawmaking.
Methodology
The goal of this study was to extract information about new laws enacted by the Massachusetts legislature since 1997, which was the first year of the 180th legislative session and is the earliest year available on the legislature’s website. All data was pulled from the Legislature’s “Session Law” page and processed using R.
We set up a simple website scraper, which gave us a data frame with 9,389 laws enacted by the legislature since 1997. Each row had three details: 1) the name of the law, 2) the year it was enacted, and 3) the two-year legislative session in which it was enacted.
Then we coded a classification system to sort the laws into five categories on the basis of key words in the law name. The classification system was based on categories that Act on Mass has used to manually classify new laws enacted by the Legislature since January 2025.
The categories are as follows:
- Sick leave banks: laws enacted by the legislature to set up a sick leave bank on behalf of a single state employee, allowing fellow employees to donate sick days
- Commemorative laws: laws establishing a new state day, week, or month honoring a particular community, person, historical event, disease awareness, etc. or designating a new state song, bird, cookie etc.
- Appropriations: annual budgets, supplemental budgets, and bond authorization bills
- Local laws: laws pertaining to individual cities or towns, usually concerning home rule petitions, parcels of land, or exemptions for individual employees
- General policy laws: all other laws, most of which make a policy change to the Massachusetts’ general laws or pertain to a state-level issue
The key metric of this study is a trend in the number of general policy laws enacted by the Legislature over time. Therefore, when edge cases arose, we aired on the side of over-estimating the number of general policy laws. The keyword decision tree was as follows:
- Bills containing the term “sick leave” are labeled Sick leave banks.
- Bills containing the terms “college,” “university,” “county,” “fire district,” or “water district” are labeled General policy laws.
- This prevents laws pertaining to entities that share the same name as a municipality from being labeled ‘local.’ Although fire districts, water districts, and universities could be argued to be local concerns, many serve regional functions of different sizes. For the purposes of this study, we opted to consider them all as policy bills.
- Bills are checked against a list of Massachusetts’ 351 municipalities, any containing the name of a municipality are labeled Local.
- Bills containing the terms “town of” and “city of” are labeled Local.
- This was to catch 9 bills with spelling errors in the name of a municipality – two 2009 laws concerning the “Town of Brooline” for example
- Bills containing the key words “appropriations,” “fiscal year,” or “bond” are labeled Appropriations.
- Note: there are a number of laws which concern bond issuance by a particular municipality, e.g. “An Act relative to the issuance of certain bonds by the City of Everett. (2002).” We opted to consider these as local bills, which is why that decision comes first. The Appropriations category is intended to distinguish state level laws which concern appropriations or funding, not policy.
- Bills containing the key words “designating,” “day,” “week,” “month,” or “observance” are labeled Commemorative laws.
- Note: there are a number of laws “designating” a landmark within a particular municipality, e.g. “An Act designating an overpass in the town of Somerset as the John Marshall overpass. (1998).” We opted to consider these as local bills, which is why that decision comes first. The Commemorative Law category is intended to distinguish statewide non-budget laws which do not have a direct policy intent.
- All remaining laws are labeled General policy laws.
The resulting classification was checked against Act on Mass’ manual classification for the years 1997, 2025, and 2026. Manually classifying 1997 was done to ensure that the trends could not be attributed to any change in naming conventions for bills; this was not the case and the classification system was equally accurate for 1997, 2025, and 2026. The only differences from the original manual classification were the edge cases that we chose to treat differently, e.g. considering fire districts as a “General policy law” instead of “Local.”
Results
Data
Click here to download the uncategorized dataset of all laws passed from January 1997 – September 15th, 2026.
Click here to download the categorized dataset.
Analysis
Feedback
If you have feedback on the results of this study or any of our other work, please send us an email at info@actonmass.org.