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17.251, Introduction to Congressional Politics Fall 2004 |
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Lecture handouts |
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| Direct to Capitol Hill (more or less) | Data and publications about congressional action |
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The House of Representatives and the Senate have their own Web pages. Lots of stuff here. Thomas, which is a service of the Library f Congress, isanother great site. Of particular interest is the Legislative Branch link. The House Rules Committee hosts an indispensable site that gathers together the Congressional Research service reports on the legislative process. This is the collection of information about the nuts and bolts of legislation. Digitized and searchable fascimiles of early congressional documents is available at the Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation site. Totally cool! You can also search the House and Senate Journals up to the 42nd Congress (up to 1873), in addition to other documents. The Center for Legislative Archives of the National Archives and Records Administration keeps old original congressional records that you can travel to DC to do research on. This site is also useful for doing research far away from D.C. C-SPAN to see live television from the floor of the House and Senate Roll Call is the "home town newspaper" of Capitol Hill. Information ranging from straight news to hometown gossip. The Hill is an upstart competitor that's a little edgier. The Dirksen Center has created a site called CongressLink, which contains a mixture of good congressional links and academic exercises. A research project at UNC-Chapel Hill is trying to develop a user-friendly filter for searching the Congressional Record. Campaign finance The Campaign Finance Institute site is very useful, particularly in providing an on-line version of the campaign finance tables that are published in Vital Statistics on Congress, 2001-2002. (Vital Statistics is an indispensable reference source for any student of American politics. FECInfo is a private Web site that turns around FEC data. This is sometimes more useful than the FEC site. The Center for Responsive Politics has a lot of information about individual MCs, particularly information about campaign finance. |
The Washington Post has a very good page that points to U.S. Government information sites, including Congress. My own congressional data, including recent updates to my standing committee data. The Dirksen Center honors the memory of Sen. Everett M. Dirksen. It has grants and educational programs that are of some interest to the professional and student, alike. Their CongressLink page has a lot of resources that are helpful to teachers and students of Congress. Congressional Observer Publications has a bunch of information (including roll call votes) about Congress. This is a commercial site, but it looks good. Congressional Information Service indexes and offers access to most congressional documents. Available to MIT users only.
Keith Poole at
the University of Houston has the most interesting and useful roll
call information up and running for recent years. (I hope Keith doesn't
mind putting his home page on mine...)
David
Lublin, at American University, has posted his congressional
district data.
While it's not data -- it's software -- the PoliSim election simulator provides a pretty neat visualization of how spatial models of electoral competition work. (The page is now about 8 years old and written in Java 1.0. Please take the fellow up on his challenge to update it.) The Legislative
Studies Section of the American Political Science Association
has its own home page, including the electronic version of its newsletter
and other legislative links. Elections and politics Pollingreport.com has the most comprehensive set of reports about recent public opinion polls. News sources Here are some links to sources for news about Congress.
Direct to boot hill The Political Graveyard is a fun excursion .
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