Getting Started

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Congressional Bills Project

Welcome to the Policy Agendas Project website

Recipient of the American Political Science Association's 2007 Best Instructional Website Award.

The Policy Agendas Project collects and organizes data from various archived sources to trace changes in the national policy agenda and public policy outcomes since the Second World War. To obtain more details about the project, current and upcoming datasets, and our web-based delivery system, explore our website or click here.

Policymaking activity in each dataset is coded according to the same policy content coding system, making it possible to compare the policy processes of over five decades.

Available datasets include congressional hearings, statutes, Congressional Quarterly stories, a sample of New York Times stories, Gallup's Most Important Problem series, Presidential Executive Orders, Presidential State of the Union Addresses, Supreme Court Cases, Congressional Bills, and Congressional roll call votes. In addition, each of these series can be compared to Congressional Budget Authority.

Data can be accessed in a variety of formats.

• Download the complete raw datasets in excel or tab-delimited text formats from the Datasets section of the website.
• Download customized, filtered datasets using the policy analysis tool in the Data Tools section of the website.
• Or simply graph and compare policy trends across datasets using the policy analysis and budget graphing tools in the Data Tools section of the website.

The Data Tools section also provides a variety of data resources in addition to the graphing tools, including access to congressional jurisdictions data (herfindahl indexes) and congressional committee changes over time.

We hope that instructors will begin to use these tools in the classroom to supplement their lectures and as the basis for student research assignments at the undergraduate and graduate levels. We provide teaching materials in our Resources section. We would like to invite you to submit your teaching ideas to help us develop these tools into a major resource for the teaching community.

We encourage you to explore the resources we have made available. Check back often as we continue to update the site with new analysis tools and datasets. Please contact us if you have any questions or comments.

The material in this webpage is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0111443.

What's New

Data updates
New data available for the NY Times dataset. Read More...

Data updates
New data available for the public laws dataset. Read More...

Data updates
New data available for CQ and Budget datasets. Read More...

Data Release & Updates
A new dataset on Congressional roll call voting records is now available online. New hearings data also available. Read More...

MIP Update
The MIP Dataset has been updated through 2004.

New Cert Denied Supreme Court data
Preliminary data from the cert denied component of our Supreme Court Dataset is now available. Read More ... 

New Dataset
A new Supreme Court Dataset is now available. Read More...

Data Release
The State of the Union dataset is available for download. Read More...

Congressional Bills Data Our sister site has released a new data analysis tool. See the Congressional Bills project website for more information.

Update Notifications
Would you like to receive automatic email notification when updates occur? Read More...