Tracking how technology policy spreads and changes across U.S. states.
Technology policy in the U.S. is made state by state, but it doesn't originate state by state. Bills travel — borrowing text, weakening provisions, absorbing industry amendments, and arriving in the tenth state looking very different from the first. PolicyTrace makes that process visible. It treats policy diffusion as an analytical object, not a background condition.
A tree/network diagram showing the lineage of bills within a policy family. Hover a node for a diff-style summary of what changed from parent to child.
Flag when a company that lost a policy fight in one state then registered to lobby on a similar bill in another state within 18 months.
Choropleth map of adoption status per policy family. Absence is data — 'no activity' states are analytically present with tooltip explanations.
Kaplan-Meier survival curve and linear probability model (OLS) testing whether opposition salience predicts bill failure. Inference-flagged data labeled throughout.
Full dataset downloads: bills, positions, lobbying registrations, genealogy tags, timeline data, opposition salience field. Full codebook included.
PolicyTrace is an open-source research tool for tracking how technology policy spreads across U.S. states. It maps bill genealogies, measures diffusion speed, records organized opposition, and makes the underlying data available for download. Primary audiences are policy researchers, investigative journalists, legislative staff, and public interest advocates.