US Policy Agendas Project

1. US Policy Agendas Project The Policy Agendas Project The Policy Agendas Project collects, organizes and codes data from various sources to trace changes in the national policy agenda and public policy outcomes since the Second World War. Policymaking activity in each dataset is coded according to the same policy content coding system, making it possible to compare policy processes over five decades. The project is directed by Bryan Jones and John Wilkerson of the University of Washington and Frank Baumgartner of Pennsylvania State University. The Policy Agendas Project is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0111443. Policy Content Coding System The policy content coding system ties together all of the Policy Agendas Project datasets (excluding the US Budget dataset) and the Congressional Bills Project’s database. There are 19 major topics - from macroeconomics to public lands and water management - and over 220 subtopics - from the unemployment rate to water resources development and research. Project Datasets The following datasets are available through a web-based delivery system in a variety of formats, including raw datasets in Excel or tab-delimited text formats; customized, filtered datasets using the policy analysis tool; and, policy analysis and budget graphing tools: The Congressional Bills Project The Congressional Bills Project is a relational database of 377,361 public and private bills introduced in the U.S. House and Senate between 1947 and 2000 and is the only digital source of information about approximately 200,000 bills introduced between 1947 and 1972. The Bills Project enables researchers, students and the general public to download information about bills introduced in the U.S. Congress along with extensive information about those bills' sponsors. The Bills data are provided in a form that permits quantitative investigations. Common keys also enable researchers to link these data to other datasets. In addition, each bill is coded according to the policy content coding system of the Policy Agendas Project. Thus bill sponsorship activity can be directly compared to activity in a variety of policy venues over approximately 50 years. Information on congressional bills comes from The Library of Congress’ THOMAS website and the Congressional Record. Principal Investigators: E. Scott Adler of the University of Colorado and John Wilkerson of the University of Washington. National Science Foundation Grants no. 00880066 and 0111443 to University of Washington and no. 00880061 to University of Colorado. State of the Union Speeches Sources: C-SPAN, Public Papers of the President from the Federal Register, Congressional Quarterly Almanac and the Congressional Record Record Count: 18,854 This dataset contains information on each quasi-sentence in the Presidential State of the Union Speeches from 1946 to 2005. Presidential Executive Orders Source: The Federal Register Record Count: 3,800 This dataset contains information about each presidential executive order issued from 1945 to 2003. Historical Budget Records of the United States Government Source: Budget of the United States Government, Office of Management and Budget Record Count: 6,900 The Historical Budget Records consist of annual time series of actual budget authority figures corrected for inflation, adjusted to fit current definitions, and revised to be consistent over time from 1947 to 2006. The following datasets are available in Excel or tab-delimited text format only: The U.S. Supreme Court Dataset Sources: United States Reports and The Original U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Database by Harold J. Spaeth Record Count: 7,103 This dataset tracks the policy agenda of the Supreme Court over time with information on all cases argued before the Court from 1953 to 1998. Over the next few years we will be releasing a dataset that includes all Solicitor General briefs. Gallup’s Most Important Problem Source: Gallup Organization Public Opinion Polls Record Count: 1,160 The Most Important Problem dataset contains results from every Gallup poll asking Americans to name "the most important problem facing this country today" from 1947 to 2004. Congressional Hearings Source: Congressional Information Service/Annual Abstracts of Congressional Publications Record Count: 83,337 The Congressional Hearings dataset contains information on all hearings of House and Senate committees, subcommittees, joint committees, task forces, panels and commissions of the United States Congress from 1946 to 2005. Public Laws Source: Congressional Quarterly Almanac Record Count: 18,499 The Public Laws dataset contains information on each public law passed by the United States Congress from 1948 to 2004. Congressional Quarterly Stories Source: Congressional Quarterly Almanac Record Count: 13,715 The CQ Almanac covers major legislative initiatives introduced during each session of Congress. The Congressional Quarterly Stories dataset contains information from all CQ articles from 1948 to 2003. New York Times Stories Source: The New York Times Index Record Count: 44,334 The Index provides abstracts for all stories that appear in the Times in a given year. The New York Times dataset consists of a systematic random sampling of the story abstracts from 1946 to 2003. Congressional Roll Call Votes 36,861 Records This dataset contains information on every congressional roll call vote from 1946 to 2000. It integrates information from two major Congressional roll call voting datasets, the United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1990 (USC RC) compiled by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal and the Political Institutions and Public Choice Program’s Roll Call Voting Data for the U.S. House of Representatives, 1953-2004 (RCVD) compiled by David Rohde. Potential Application of Automated Coding The application of automated coding could be used to extend an established topic classification system such as the Policy Agendas Project’s to large numbers of new events. New cases could include recent government activities (e.g. thousands of bills and hearings in the most recent Congress); digitized historical records (e.g. the Library of Congress’s recent initiative to digitize congressional hearings since 1789; and extensions to new domains (e.g. millions of New York Times articles; millions of pages of legislative text; state governments, other nations, etc).The Policy Agendas Project’s policy content coding system is used by researchers to study patterns and trends and to search for individual documents. For these reasons, automated text coding programs must not only be efficient, they must also achieve reliabilities approaching or exceeding those of expert human coders.