Politics Research Guide

List of sources for contemporary Asian news in specific countries.

European news is well covered in the Contemporary News Aggregators (Lexis, Factiva, Newsbank). This is a list of additional sources for contemporary European news in particular countries.

List of additional sources for English and foreign language news of the Middle East.

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1988-2019 (no longer updated) FNS contains White House briefings & statements by the President, Congressional hearings, National Press Club speeches (when discussing major topics or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 nearly 1,000,000 emails from 16,000 senders, Dec. 2019 - Nov 2020. You can search the corpus online or request access to the dataset via a webform. See also this related downloadable corpus of more than 240,000 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.

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.

Pulling from the Internet Archive: TV Archive, this dataset includes nearly all daily recordings of CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC from January 1, 2010 on. Updates daily with a 1-2 day lag from original airing. Contains over 370,000 hours of both news and commercial segments. Project runs facial detection using Amazon's Celebrity recognition API and aligns captions to audio tracks to enable querying both screen time for individuals as well as the length of time various words are heard in segments. Advanced querying options, results can be aggregated by day/week/month/year, and graph images and plot data can be downloaded to .csv.

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

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.

A multilingual and annotated collection of over 3000 electoral programs / manifestos from more than 60 different countries in almost 40 languages. Accessible in machine-readable formats, each manifesto is decomposed into quasi-sentences (nearly 2m) and coded according to the Manifesto Coding scheme of 56 substantive topics. The corpus also includes key metadata for each program, such as party name and election date. Many also include machine-readable English translation text. Data available via download, API, and R and Stata packages.

A set of models based on multilingual XLM-RoBERTa large models fine-tuned on more than 1.5 million annotated statements in the Manifesto Corpus. "They provide strong performance in classifying political texts, with the ability to categorize a wide range of political discourse into the categories of the rich manifesto project coding scheme and across various languages."

Provides an annotated list of numerous European parliamentary corpora from the CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) EU open research project. Dozens of corpora covering more than 20 European countries and languages, mostly from 2000 forward, though a few go back decades or a century.

ParlEE Plenary Speeches is a collection of 4 datasets contains the full-text speeches from 28 European parliaments covering 2009-2019. Each dataset provides the plenary speeches split to the sentence-level annotated with date, speaker, party, EU vs. domestic politics classification, and relevant policy area (using the Comparative Agendas Project coding scheme). Data in .csv.

ParlaMint is a multilingual corpora of parliamentary debates from 29 European countries and autonomous regions, 2015-2022. The corpora have been encoded using a harmonized schema allowing for comparability across the datasets and incorporate extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); terms, sessions and meetings; and speaker roles (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also include mark-up indicating gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. For additional info and resources, see the ParlaMint Project Website.

Contains complete full-text vectors of more than 6.3 million parliamentary speeches in the key legislative chambers of Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, covering periods between 21 and 32 years. Meta-data include information on date, speaker, party, and (partially) agenda item under which a speech was held. Data in R format.

"Contains complete corpora of more than 2.5 million parliamentary speeches in the key legislative chambers of Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain," primarily 1999-2019. Includes information on date, speaker, party, and speaker's parliamentary role/position (when available) and "legislative instrument under which a speech was made." Data in R format.

Dataset of 17,184 speeches from EU leaders (i.e., heads of government in 10 member states, EU commissioners, party leaders in the European Parliament, and ECB and IMF leaders) from 2007 to 2015. These speeches vary in sentiment, topics and ideology, allowing for fine-grained, over-time comparison of representation in the EU. Data in R format.

Speeches given by Danish and Dutch politicians at party congresses between 1946 and 2017. The dataset is an unique collection of materials from different party archives and digital repositories. It offers an unique opportunity to analyze the issues discussed in these speeches, the positions taken, and the rhetoric used by party elites over time and between-country. Data in R format.

Dataset on the proceedings from each sitting day in the Australian Parliament House of Representatives 1998-2022, parsed from the official XML files. Each row contains an individual statement with details on the individual speaking. Project also includes data on debate topics, Australian MPs, and electoral divisions (i.e., recorded votes). Data in both CSV and parquet forms.

The entire corpus of the Canadian Hansard parsed into speeches and enriched with data on MPs, parties, and constituencies. Data available in Postgres SQL database.

Collected all English-language material published by Russia, North Korea, China, and Iran through their official media and foreign ministry websites. The dates and number of articles vary by source, but generally ~2010-2020. Sources include:
*China: Global Times, People’s Daily, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs;
*Iran: Islamic Republic News Agency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs;
*North Korea: Korean Central News Agency and Rodong Sinmun;
*Russia: Sputnik, Russia Today, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Contains headlines, date, and text, (sometimes author and URL). After collection, sentiment and topic analysis were conducted on the article's text for select databases. Both raw and analyzed content are included. Public visualization site available.

Contains more than 385,000 transcripts from speeches and oral contributions made in the Russian State Duma between 11 January 1994 and 17 June 2021 with frequency analysis of the terms used by the deputies in their Duma speeches. Also includes a database of Duma deputies and members of the Russian Federation Council since 1994.

Project creating datasets and tools for studying post-Soviet text as data. Initial datasets include: All items published on the website of the Russian weekly magazine ‘Zavtra’ (1996-2023); and separate datasets for all items published on the Russian and English language versions of the Kremlin’s website (2000-2023).

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.