POL 324: Congressional Politics

Issued biennially, the Almanac provides in-depth analysis and comprehensive profiles of every congressional district, state, governor and member of Congress. Previous years are in print at JK1012 .A44 (Firestone) back to 1972.

Biennial reference on with detailed bios on each Member and congressional district. Online back to 2006; in print at JK1010 .P64 (Firestone) back to 1982.

Find Congressional roll call votes by topic, session, or CQ key vote; view and compare members of Congress by biographical and demographic characteristics; compare members’ voting records; view interest group and state and member voting alignment and party unity scores; and see Supreme Court case summaries relating to the structure and powers of Congress. Data can be exported to Excel. 79th Congress (1945)-present.

Quick tool for exploring the most recent demographic, social, and business data collected by the Census Bureau for individual congressional districts.

You can get up-to-date Congressional District demographic data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS). It's available freely online from Census (see the link above), but you might find Social Explorer's interface easier to use if you want to select a custom set of variables from among the many the ACS makes available. Select Tables in the left nav, then choose ACS 1-year estimates, select Congressional District under geography, and then choose variables of interest.

Large collection of public statements and press releases from public officials and candidates, both nationally and at the state level and for various offices.

Collects, archives, and makes publicly available every official e-newsletter sent by sitting members of the US Congress since 2010. Updated in real time, as members of Congress send constituent messages, and provides researchers with a systematic set of texts to examine the strategic choices that legislators and their staff make in crafting the content. Data available in .csv by month.

This corpus contains emails from candidates running for state and federal office, political parties, and other political organizations like PACs.
Contains more than 400,000 emails from 3,000+ senders since Dec. 2019. You can search the corpus online or request access to the dataset via a webform.

See also this related downloadable corpus of more than 110,000 candidate and committee emails gathered by journalist Derek Willis over the past few years.

Profiles for each Congressional committee, with links to the current website, membership lists, hearings, and documents.

Major news source covering Congress, U.S. politics, and policy debates.

Major news sources covering Congress and Capitol Hill (also included in our CQ.com subscription, see above). You can also browse archived issues.

A weekly news magazine featuring in-depth reporting on public policy, politics, congressional legislation, and elections extending back to 1983, including: a complete wrap-up of news on Congress, the status of bills in play, behind-the-scenes maneuvering, committee and floor activity, debates, and all roll-call votes.