Though there is wide recognition among members of both parties that the nation’s immigration laws need to be updated to address the 11 million people here without documentation, immigration overhaul failed to get any further than the Senate. There was no agreement on a farm bill that would provide agricultural subsidies as well as food stamps for poor families. The deep financial problems at the United States Postal Service went unaddressed by major legislation. And the cumbersome, unpopular tax code was untouched, as were federal benefit programs like Medicare whose costs are soaring.

Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who as chairman of the Finance Committee has been pursuing a deal on tax overhaul, summed up his low expectations on reaching compromise on any major legislation: “My view is you get what you can get and you keep going forward. You do what you can do.”

As a benchmark for congressional productivity, scholars do not look only at the volume of bills passed, which ignores important nuances like the complexity of the issues addressed by Congress. It also overlooks the question of whether making more laws is beneficial.

Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has come up with a way of calculating how effective Congresses have been by looking at what laws were passed relative to the salient national issues at the time. The numbers are not flattering to anyone on Capitol Hill.

Her most recent data through the 112th Congress, which met from January 2011 to January 2013, showed that 72 percent of the issues at the national forefront met a legislative stalemate and went unresolved. That tied the record for the most gridlocked Congress since 1947: the 106th, which included the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. “It’s fairly easy to trace polarization to partisan gridlock,” Ms. Binder said. “And we are, as people say, as polarized as we’ve ever been.”

These data do not point to a complete lack of activity in Congress. The Republican-controlled House, in fact, has been a hive of legislative action. But the bills it has passed have often been used to score points with the party’s base, a practice criticized by Democrats as “governing by press release.”

Among them have been measures to restrict abortion, roll back government oversight powers and dismantle Mr. Obama’s health care law. The House has passed variations of bills meant to defang the health care law nearly four dozen times before they forced a government shutdown over the issue in October.