The leadership score is supplied by Govtrack, is editorially blind, and basically measures who originates legislation versus who signs onto the legislation of others. Leadership is scored on a scale from -2 (co-signers) to 2 (legislative leaders). Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) is the House legislative leader at 2.4. Many of the members of Congress who rate low in this metric are junior members in their first 2 terms.
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Govtrack explains it rather well:
It is based on patterns of cosponsorship. Roughly speaking, each time a Member of Congress cosponsors another Member of Congress’s bill, the first Member of Congress gives the second Member of Congress some leadership points . . . in proportion to how many leadership points the first Member of Congress has. It is basically the same way Google ranks pages in their search results.
We can be a little more assured that this analysis actually reflects some aspect of reality. It is in a sense measuring the give-and-take relationships that Members of Congress have with each other, or at least the part of those relationships exposed through bill cosponsorship. One interesting point is that while, at the time of writing, the highest leadership score in the Senate is “correctly” given to the Senate Majority Leader, the Speaker of the House has a relatively low leadership score. This is easily explained by the fact that the Speaker tends not to introduce legislation herself (written about Pelosi, though Boehner does not score high on leadership either), and it reinforces the fact that reality cannot be boiled down to single statistics.
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