Nearly two weeks ago, we examined the frequency of cosponsorship for all Bills and Joint Resolutions in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Cosponsorship is the signing of a member of Congress’ name to a bill, an act that formally indicates support for the bill, and thanks to the government Thomas database (named after President Jefferson) it is possible to track changes in cosponsorship over time. With the 111th Congress a bit farther along, let’s take another look and see what’s changed.

Below are two graphs, showing the frequency distribution of bill cosponsorship in the two chambers of Congress as of February 25, 2009. In both graphs, the y-axis represents the number of cosponsorships for a bill, and there is a dot for each bill placed along that axis.

Every bill must have a principal sponsor, but not every bill has a cosponsor. Indeed, the most common sort of bill in the House of Representatives so far is a bill without any cosponsors. At this admittedly early point in the 111th Congress, 479 bills in the House have no cosponsors, an additional 149 bills have just one cosponsor, and 79 bills have two cosponsors. The frequency distribution drops off pretty quickly from there, with only a handful of bills gaining more than a hundred cosponsors. Only three bills have more than 180 sponsors, the clear outliers in the House distribution. As was true two weeks ago, the top five bills in the number of cosponsors in the House are H.R. 707, H.R. 12, H.R. 11, H.R. 226, and H.R. 235.

In the Senate, there is a similar dropoff, although of course the absolute number of cosponsors of bills tends to be smaller than in the House because the House has a capacity of 435 members, while the Senate can hold only 100 members. One bill, the already passed S. 181, is an outlier with 52 cosponsors. As was the case two weeks ago, three bills follow in cosponsorship frequency: S. 34, S. 388 and S. 211. The fifth-most cosponsored bill in the Senate, however, is a new entrant to the top five. S. 422 is a bill with 26 cosponsors, 5 of them Republicans, 20 of them Democrats, and one of them the Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Introduced by Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, S. 422 purports to alter the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in order to better research women’s cardiovascular disease, but actually (as Irregular Times notes in an article today) does a fair bit more than that.

Look for more of our regularly updated reports on cosponsorship activity in the U.S. Congress. They’ll keep coming throughout the course of the 111th Congress.