Site Help
How to Use This Site
This site makes our datasets available for download. Additionally, it provides web-based tools for graphing and comparing trends in the data. We also provide resources to supplement the data for researchers as well as resources to help instructors incorporate our datasets into their courses.
Below is a description of the tools and features that you will find in each of the major sections of the site.
- Datasets
- Our current datasets include: Congressional Hearings, Public Laws (Statutes), New York Times Index, CQ Almanac, Gallup Most Important Problem (Public Opinion), Executive Orders, and Budget Authority.
- Datasets are available for download in the Datasets section of the website. The accompanying codebooks are available in both the Codebooks link and through links on the Datasets page.
- The raw datasets can be downloaded as excel files or as tab-delimited text (ASCII) files to make uploading the data into your statistics package (like STATA or SPSS) easier.
- Codebooks
- Each of the datasets has a codebooks to explain the field names and values.
- There are two codebooks, the Topics Codebook and Committees Codebook, that provide information for codes that may be found in all the core datasets (topics codes and committees codes).
- See the Codebooks link to access or download the codebooks.
- Data and Graphing Tools
- We have three web-based graphing tools at the moment: The Policy Analysis Tool, Budget Graphing Tool, and a mixed Policy-Budget graphing tool. These tools allow users to graph and compare trends in each of these datasets.
For example:- Graph and compare the number of New York Times stories about education issues and the number of Congressional hearings about education issues
- Graph and compare Congressional Budget Authority for defense versus education in FY2000 Dollars.
- Track the percent of the total budget that each budget function comprises.
- Graph the number of hearings about education compared to the budget for education.
- This Policy Analysis Tool also allows users to download customized, filtered versions of each of the core datasets. For example, while our Hearings dataset spans the years 1946 through 2000, you might only be interested in data for hearings about education between 1970 and 1995.
- The Data Tools also provide additional data-related resources, such as
- the Congressional Committee Jurisdiction measures (herfindahl indexes),
- a sortable committee table for tracking congressional committee name changes and the appearance of new committees,
- and a "cross-walk" for matching the Budget dataset function codes to the core datasets policy topic codes.
- Resources
- Resources include teaching resources and suggestions, and non-data-related resources including a bibliography of policy related sources and links to other policy and American politics websites
- News and Events
- Check here for news about updates to the datasets and website features, as well as events such as APSA shortcourses.
Context-Specific Help
Policy Tool Help
The Policy Analysis Tool features our core policy datasets (currently Congressional Hearings, Public Laws, New York Times Stories, and Congressional Quarterly Stories). Using the tool, you can: graph and compare attention to specific policy issues across these venues; find original source information from the drill down table; and download customized, filtered versions of our core datasets. The links below provide context-specific help for this feature.
Customizing Chart Features
Once you have submitted your query, a graphic display of your data will appear. While the default display is adequate, you may want to alter the display to your own specifications to best fit the data. There are a number of features that are not immediately obvious, but are very useful. The following links will address several of these features:
Budget Tool Help
The Budget Tool includes two useful features. The Budget Trends Tool allows users to graph changes in the budget over time in specific policy areas. This tool can graph the budget Fiscal Year 2000 Dollars and Current Year Dollars. A second version of the web tool can graph the percent of the total budget that each function and subfunction comprises. With this tool, users can assess various budget priorities. The following links will give users an overview of these tools:
Getting Started
The following links will help you get started using the tools on this
site:
- Scenarios
These scenarios offer examples of using the policy agendas project website resources. They also offer suggestion about lesson topics that the datasets could address.
The scenarios discuss infromation in one of the preconstructed graphs (see Graph Examples, below), walks you through how to create the same graph using the Policy Analysis Tool, and then discusses additional analyses that could be done using the raw datasets.
- Graph Examples
These are preconstructed graphs using the Policy Agendas Datasets to show a sample of the time-based trends that the datasets can provide.
- Policy Tool Tutorial
This is a step-by-step guide with images to using the Policy Analysis Graphing tool.
- Chart Tutorial
This is a step-by-step guide about how to modify the chart produced by the Policy Analysis tool and the budget tools. (Note: web-based modification of the chart is only available to Internet Explorer browsers and Netscape 7.0+ browsers.)
Citation Guidelines
Before citing any content on this site, please familiarize yourself
with our Citation
Guidelines
Technical Issues
Our site has been tested with the following browsers:
- Internet Explorer 6 or above
- Netscape Navigator 7 or above
- Mozilla Firefox
The following browsers may have problems with this site:
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