American Politics

Building on the Vanderbilt TV News Archive, the Internet Archive collects and preserves TV news from U.S. national and cable networks, some international stations, and stations in San Francisco and Washington D.C. Search closed caption text and short, streamed clips (full broadcasts can be borrowed on DVD for a fee). The archive is updated with new broadcasts 24 hours after they are aired. Contains nearly 1.5 million broadcasts, including curated collections on Donald Trump, the Executive Branch, 9/11, and more. Their Third Eye project (2017-present) captures data on the chyrons (breaking news banners) that run on BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.

Allows you to visualize keyword trends in the Internet Archive's collection of American television news. The Television Explorer breaks results into individual sentences and counts how many of those sentences contain your keyword of interest. Results can be graphed or downloaded to CSV or JSON. See also their companion 2016 Campaign Television Tracker and 2016 Candidate Web Tracker

Extensive archive of political video covering every C-SPAN program aired since 1987. Particularly valuable for coverage of Congress, including video of congressional hearings, but also lots of coverage of campaigns and elections.

Fabulous site containing lots of information on the presidency, especially a fully searchable database of the Papers of the Presidents back to Washington, the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (Carter to G.W. Bush), and the Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents (2009-current). Also has party platforms back to 1840, convention speeches, candidates' remarks, election debates back to 1960, executive orders and proclamations, presidential approval back to 1941, vetoes, state of the union addresses, press briefings, and more.

1988-2019 (no longer updated) FNS contains White House briefings & statements by the President, Congressional hearings, National Press Club speeches (when discussing major topics or remarks by key U.S. or foreign figures), special briefings whether on record or not for attribution in addition to remarks of top ranking officials. CQ contains transcripts of 4 to 5 complete congressional hearings per day as well as press briefings from the State, Justice, and Defense departments, presidential news conferences and press briefings, and speeches and press conferences by national newsmakers, 1995+. If searching for speeches, try something like: (HEADLINE(mccain w/8 (remarks OR speech))).

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

Contains processed text from the bound and daily editions of the United States Congressional Record collected by Gentzkow et al. The bound edition covers the 43rd to 111th (1873–2011) Congresses, and the daily edition covers the 97th to 114th (1981–2017). Each edition includes all text spoken on the floor of each chamber of Congress. An automated script parses the text from each session to produce full-text speeches, metadata on speeches and their speakers, and counts of two-word phrases (bigrams) by speaker and party.

Official White House site providing text, photos, and video of statements, speeches, remarks, proclamations, executive orders, etc.

Extensive collection of presidential speeches from the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Covers all administrations, many with audio and/or video.

The most complete record of presidential proclamations known to exist, with proclamations from President George Washington to President Barack Obama (approximately 10,000 records and counting). Provides a database of proclamations (and related directives), searchable by President, year, proclamation number, and issue category.

Collection of large Twitter datasets (tweet IDs) on a variety of newsworthy topics, including a number of political and election-related topics (primarily US) back to 2016. To use them, you have to rehydrate the tweets using a tool like DocNow’s Hydrator: https://github.com/DocNow/hydrator.

Fully searchable archive of nearly all of Pres. Trump's tweets since assuming office. Data can also be downloaded in bulk as a .csv or JSON file (click on FAQ at the top). For the period prior to the 2016 election, try Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/austinreese/trump-tweets or https://www.kaggle.com/benhamner/clinton-trump-tweets.

Collects the daily tweets of both houses of Congress, encompassing 1,000+ campaign, office, committee and party accounts. The collected tweets are available as JSON datasets. Freely available on GitHub; covers June 2017 forward. For just the most recent daily updates, see the public site.

Politwoops tracks deleted tweets by public officials, including people currently in office and candidates for office. Can be filtered by state, party, position, or politician.

Collects, archives, and makes publicly available every official e-newsletter sent by sitting members of the US Congress since 2010. Updated in real-time, it provides researchers with a systematic set of texts to examine the strategic choices that legislators and their staff make in crafting the content. Full dataset can be downloaded in .csv.

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.

Project run primarily out of the Brookings Institution that tracks and analyzes thousands of episodes from nearly 120 prominent political podcast series in the US. The dataset updates daily with new episode information. Variables include show name, date, episode title and description, partisan leaning, Apple Podcasts category, and url to raw audio file. Data in .csv.

The experimental Radio News Archive allows people to search through English language talk & news-focused radio stations from 2016 through the present using transcripts created with automatic speech recognition technology. Includes a number of US conservative radio talk shows. MIT's MediaLab has also produced a corpus of automatically transcribed US talk radio captured during part of 2018-2019: https://github.com/social-machines/RadioTalk.

Contains transcripts of speeches, TV ads and debates of 12 US general election Presidential compaigns from 1952 though 1996. In .doc, .txt, and json formats.

Contains the transcripts of United States presidential and vice presidential televised debates of the twentieth century. Includes general election debates among candidates from 1960 to 1996.

Large collection of speeches, both political and not, in mp3, PDF, and html formats.

Archive of state of the state speeches by governors in all 50 states 2002-2011.

Successor to the Wisconsin Advertising Project (below), 2010+ with a rolling 2-4 year embargo imposed by Kantar Media/CMAG, who supply the data. You can view the codebooks online, but you must submit a data use agreement and $20 for each campaign year requested. There is some summary data and analysis available through the press releases of the project.

• Political ad airings & content data: presidential: 2012, 2016, 2020; Congressional, gubernatorial, "down ballot" races: 2006, 2010-2020
• Population health messaging in political ads 2012 & 2016
• Health insurance ads 2013-2018 (all in one data set)

Datasets covering TV campaign ads for federal and gubernatorial elections, 1998–2008. You can view the codebooks online, but you must submit a data use agreement and $20 for each campaign year requested. All datasets are provided in SPSS and Stata formats. Storyboards of all creatives are also provided as PDFs. Over time coverage increased to all 210 media markets in the US.

Repository of over 800,000 ads and 2.5 million videos from the the 2020 U.S. presidential election posted on Facebook (including Instagram), Google, YouTube, and TikTok. From a paper by Papakyriakopoulos et al. "How Algorithms Shape the Distribution of Political Advertising: Case Studies of Facebook, Google, and TikTok." Proceedings of the 2022 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 532–546. https://doi.org/10.1145/3514094.3534166. Data in .csv.

This database by ProPublica and NYU researchers contains ads that ran on Facebook from Oct. 2020-Feb. 2022 and were submitted by thousands of volunteers from around the world via a browser extension that automatically collected advertisements on their Facebook pages. Ads are classified using machine learning to identify likely political ads. Includes numerous data fields. Data in .csv. For additional info and insight, see NYU's Ad Observatory.

Project by the Internet Archive in conjunction with their TV News Archive. Collected political TV ads in key markets during the 2016 election cycle. In addition to the videos, you can download a unique list of all ads they've collected and details of the airings, including candidate, sponsor and type, number of airings, station, location, program type, negativity, and more.

Great source for data and analysis on campaign finance at the federal level. Now includes data on political ad buys with local stations reported to the FCC. 2015–present.

Data on approximately $1.2 billion in political ad buys in 33 media markets during the 2012 election. This data set was created by nearly 1,000 volunteers and curated by ProPublica reporters.

Housed at the University of Oklahoma, the Archive is the largest most comprehensive collection of political advertising in the world, with more than 90,000 commercials, TV ads back to 1950, and radio spots back to 1936. Items can be viewed on site, or a limited number can be requested remotely via a temporary loan (fees apply).

The C-SPAN Video Library also collects some political ads for Congressional and other political candidates. Content can be filtered by date or additional keywords/terms. Early 1990s forward.

Archived website that contains numerous campaign ads from presidential (2000-2016) and various California congressional and state elections (1994-2010). Since the site is archived, not all media may have been captured.

A collection of presidential campaign commercials from 1952-present, put together by the Museum of the Moving Image. Browse by year, by type of ad, and by issue. You can make your own ad by combining historical footage with your own images and audio.

Scholarly project has a collection of political ads and analyses related to federal elections, 2012-2016.

Annotated guide to sources on multiple aspects of media effects in politics by a leading scholar, James Druckman.

Academic experts provide an assessment of contemporary research on public opinion, the media, and their interconnections. Includes extensive discussion of how public opinion and mass media coverage are studied through survey research and increasingly through experiments.

Summarizes the past and present multidisciplinary literature of the field and also advances arguments about timely issues and new research methods. Published 2012.

Extensive scholarly guide to the field of public opinion research, covering its historical development, theories, methodology, social and political environment, and fields of application. Published 2008.

Comprehensive overview of the field of communication, including key concepts and approaches, major topics of study, the media, journalism, public relations, advertising, and more. Published 2009.

Excellent source for information on political advertising and its relationship to electoral politics in the U.S. and various countries around the world. Published 2006.

Analyzes all aspects of journalism—including trends, issues, concepts, individuals, institutions, media outlets, and events. Try browsing through the Reader's Guide, which organizes entries into broad themes. Also includes an annotated guide to recent scholarship on journalism. Published 2009.

Good source for exploring concepts in political communication. Try browsing through the Reader's Guide, which organizes entries into broad themes. You can also search it or browse A-Z.

CJR "examines day-to-day press performance as well as the forces that affect that performance." Lots of coverage of political topics. For articles from the magazine, current issues are in the DeLong Room in Firestone (PN4700 .C658).

AJR "examines how the media cover specific stories and broader coverage trends. AJR analyzes ethical dilemmas in the field and monitors the impact of technology on how journalism is practiced." AJR is published 6 times a year and has its archives fully online.

Nonpartisan research unit at George Mason Univ. Has numerous studies of media coverage of presidential administrations and elections, political humor, international affairs, entertainment, and more.

A nonpartisan project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, Fact Check monitors the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases.

Fact checking website from the St. Petersburg Times that provides a "scorecard separating fact from fiction" on statements by politicians and candidates. Each statement is rated on the Truth-O-Meter, with scores like "half-true," "false," and "pants on fire!"

Large collection of links to various media sites and organizations from Project Vote Smart, a nonpartisan organization that provides extensive information on candidates and elected officials.

A leading consumer protection organization in the U.S., CDD engages in research, public education, and advocacy about contemporary digital media and marketing and their impact on public health, children and youth, and privacy.

Widely-recognized, progressive national media watchdog. Scrutinizes "media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints."

Large collection of press releases and public statements by national and state officials as well as candidates for public office.