Codebook for Public Laws Database

This dataset contains information about each public law passed from 1948-2005. The source is a brief listing in each annual edition. of the CQ Almanac. A case is a public law. As many of the following variables as possible are captured for each public law.

Variable Name and Description

Year.

The year covered in the CQ Almanac.

Congress.

The number of the Congress.

Public Law Number.

The number of the public law in the United States Code.

House or Senate Bill Number.

The bill that became law.

Description.

The concise description copied from the CQ Almanac.

Introduced.

The name of the representative or Senator who introduced the legislation. In cases where more than one name is listed, only the first person is coded.

Democrat.

1 if the representative or Senator introducing the bill is a Democrat; 0 otherwise.

House Committee(s).

The House committee(s) that reported the bill (up to two). See the Committee Codebook for a complete list of committee and subcommittee codes.

Senate Committee.

The Senate committee that reported the bill. See the Committee Codebook for a complete list of committee and subcommittee codes.

House Report, Senate Report.

The number of the report from the House and Senate committee markup(s). If a House or Senate report number is not mentioned and a conference report number is mentioned, then the conference report is coded.

Conference.

1 if the bill had a House-Senate conference committee; 0 otherwise.

Vetoed by President.

1 if vetoed by the president (meaning Congress overroad it); 0 otherwise.

Commemorative.

1 if the legislation is commemorative in nature (e.g. proclamations for theme weeks like National Potato Week, naming a federal building after someone); 0 otherwise.

Topic and Subtopic Code.

The topic of the public law from reading the Description. There are 19 major topics and well over 200 subtopics coded in the dataset. Each public law is assigned a single topic and subtopic code. See the Topics Index Codebook for a complete list of topics and subtopics.

Link

For each law from the 93rd Congress forward, a link to the bill summary and status is made available through THOMAS. From the second session of the 102nd Congress forward, the full text of the public law is also available.

Written by:
Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones
(February 1999)