  A recent study leveraging text of pandemic-related policymaking from
1973--2020 explored whether pandemic policymaking has evolved, or whether we
are witnessing a new, unique era of policymaking as it relates to large-scale
crises like COVID-19. This research picks up on this approach over the same
period of study and based on the same data, but excluding text. Instead, using
high dimensional manifold learning, this study explores the latent structure of
the pandemic policymaking space based only on bill-level characteristics.
Results indicate the COVID-19 era of policymaking maps extremely closely onto
prior periods of related policymaking. This suggests that there is less of an
"evolutionary trend" in pandemic policymaking, where instead there is striking
uniformity in Congressional policymaking related to these types of large-scale
crises, despite being in a unique era of hyperpolarization, division, and
ineffective governance.
