Political Science *

Official Websites

• Center for Legislative Archives -- a part of the National Archives and Records Administration, preserves and makes available to researchers the historical records of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
• Congress.gov -- the catalog and database of contemporary Congressional information, including bills, the Congressional Record, hearings, reports, and other Congressional activities. This replaces Thomas database.
• Congressional Directory -- the official directory of the U.S. Congress that contains biographies of each member of the Senate and House, listed by state or district, and additional data, such as committee memberships. Also contains addresses, phone numbers, and other Congressional information. Published since 1888, the online version includes members from 1995 to the present.
• Government Accountability Office -- the GAO is an independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress to investigate how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars. Site includes a searchable database of the agency's reports to Congress.
• House of Representatives -- the official website of the House of Representatives.
• House of Representatives Lobby Disclosure -- site of the House Office of the Clerk that provides up-to-date reporting of lobbyist activities required under the Lobbying Disclosure Electronic Filing System. Site includes the Lobbying Disclosure Electronic Filing System public access system covering reports from 2002 to the present.
• Résumé of Congressional Activity – site contains PDF files that provide a comprehensive recapitulation of all business transacted by the Senate and House back to the 80th (1947-48), in addition to a record of all nominations submitted to the Senate by the President for Senate confirmation.
• United States Senate -- the official website of the Senate.

• United States Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act Databases – databases created under requirements of the Secretary of the Senate to make all documents filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, as amended, available to the public. Note that the downloadable lobbying documents include all documents received during a given calendar quarter. The lobbying documents database includes the lobbying registrations (LD-1) and reports (LD-2). The contributions database is limited to the documents filed under section 203 of HLOGA (LD-203), the first of which is required to be filed by registrants and lobbyists by July 30, 2008.

Specialized Resources

• Bill Track 50 -- allows users to search by keyword or bill number to discover and review an unlimited number of bills from all states and Congress. Results present bills in the same format across all states along with full contact details for all current legislators. Also includes a new regulation tracking tool helps you discover, review, and track state and federal regulations. This is a useful site for locating state and federal bills that include up-to-date links to more detailed information.
• Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (1774-present) -- database of member of Congress that can be searched by name, position (e.g. Representative, Senator, Delegate), State, Party, and/or Year or Congress in order to create customized lists and to access short biographies.
• A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation -- consists of a linked set of published congressional records of the United States of America from the Continental Congress through the 43rd Congress, 1774-1875.
• Congressional Bills Project [copy and paste this link: http://www.congressionalbills.org/] -- provides information about more than 400,000 bills introduced in the U.S. Congress, currently from 1947-2008, along with extensive information about each bill's progress and sponsor. The bills database uses Poole and Rosenthal's ICPSR member IDs to incorporate biographical and institutional position information about each bill's sponsor. Also classifies each bill's title according to the topic coding system of the Policy Agendas Project. Each bill is designated to be primarily about one major topic and one subtopic. The Bills Project does not currently include resolutions or the bill texts. Digitized bill texts are available beginning in 1988 at www.thomas.loc.gov.
• Congressional Quarterly Magazine – an authoritative weekly magazine that provides congressional news and analysis, bill tracking, member profiles, committee coverage, government documents and transcripts. Search by topic, page number, committee, "exact phrases or words," bill number, byline or reporter and by using full-text keyword and date searches. Detailed floor votes dating back to August 1983 are easily retrieved.
• Congressional Research Service Reports -- open access site sponsored by the University of North Texas Libraries that provides access to reports released to the public by members of Congress. Reports are downloaded from a variety of web sites that host CRS reports, either currently or in the past. Many CRS reports are updated on a regular basis, and this site includes all versions of the reports that could be located.
• Federal Digital System -- FDSys provides free online access to official publications from all three branches of the United States government. The database offers advanced search capabilities and the ability to refine and narrow your search for quick access to the information you need.
• GovTrack -- research tool that helps researchers locate and track activities in the U.S. Congress. The tool can be used to identify the status of U.S. federal legislation, voting records for the Senate and House of Representatives, information on Members of Congress, district maps, as well as congressional committees and the Congressional Record. Also offers the ability to create customized tracking alerts that can be received via RSS Feed or embedded on a website.
• LegiScan -- impartial real-time legislative tracking service that offers bulk download of bills and legislative tracking information for Congress and the fifty states. The site also includes the LegiScan search engine that indexes the entire text of each of the approximately 175,000 bills introduced annually, but also maintains relative document structure ordering to allow for more advanced proximity based searches. Requires free registration.
• OpenCongress -- a free, open-source, and non-partisan web resource that brings together official government data with news coverage, blog posts, public comments, and more about what's happening in Congress. Great site!
• ProQuest Congressional -- indexes and abstracts a broad spectrum of Congressional publications, including hearings (testimony), committee prints, reports, documents, and full text of bills and public laws.
• ProQuest Congressional Research Service Reports -- access to the Congressional Research Service (CRS) studies and issue briefs on a variety of topics providing background information for investigations and legislative proposals under study by Congress. CRS works exclusively as a reference and research service for the U.S. Congress. Reports may take many forms: policy analysis, economic studies, statistical reviews, legal analyses, historical studies, chronologies, and two-page fact sheets.
• ProQuest Regulatory Insight – this resource provides researchers with content and workflow tools to facilitate research associated with administrative law, from 1936-2016. The database offers regulatory histories associated with public laws.
• United States Congressional Serial Set -- commonly referred to as the Serial Set, this collection contains the House and Senate Documents and the House and Senate Reports. The reports are usually from congressional committees dealing with proposed legislation and issues under investigation. The documents include all other papers ordered printed by the House or Senate. Documents cover a wide variety of topics and may include reports of executive departments and independent organizations, reports of special investigations made for Congress, and annual reports of non-governmental organizations. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, executive-branch materials were also published in the Serial Set.

Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites and from Jeremy Darrington's American Politics Research Guide, Princeton University Libraries.

*Note that, when searching for Committee Prints in GovInfo, search under Hearings.

Listed below are resources that support research about the relationship between money and politics. See also the official lobbying disclosure systems for the House and Senate in the adjacent text box.

• Campaign Finance Institute Historical Data Tables [copy and paste this link: http://www.cfinst.org/data/historicalstats.aspx] -- this think tank provides historical data on congressional and presidential election fundraising, expenditures, and party, interest group, and PAC spending. Tables and figures are in PDF and cover 1974-present with many of these tables are available in Excel. The Institute also produces research reports as well as a Money in Politics Bibliography covering academic literature back to 2006.
• Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections -- a general resource produced at Stanford University for the study of campaign finance and ideology in American politics. The database contains over 130 million political contributions made by individuals and organizations to local, state, and federal elections spanning a period from 1979 to 2014. A corresponding database of candidates and committees provides additional information on state and federal elections.
• Federal Election Commission Campaign Finance Data -- the site contains a variety of data files that will allow you to download itemized and trend data and filings for contributions and disbursements by and for candidates, committees, PACs, and independent expenditures. Bulk downloads of detailed data are available from an old FEC site.
• FollowTheMoney.org – provides data and reports on money and spending in state-level politics. Covers campaign finance donations, spending by outside groups, and spending on ballot measures for all fifty states. You can view national or state overviews of spending; get breakdowns by district, candidate, party, industry, incumbency status, and more. The National Institute on Money in State Politics cleans, verified, and standardizes the data. Site also includes a helpful directory of State Disclosure Offices.
• MapLight -- a nonpartisan research organization that connects data on campaign contributions in congressional elections, legislative votes by members of Congress, and which interest groups, companies, and organizations support and oppose key bills. The site also includes the Federal Money and Politics Dataset of cleaned up FEC campaign contribution data for each cycle 2008-present.
• OpenSecrets.org – supported by the Center for Responsive Politics, this is a comprehensive source for data freely available for non-commercial use on campaign finance at the federal level. Covers contributions to candidates and PACs; campaign spending by outside groups; lobbying and interest groups; personal finances of politicians and the revolving door of politicians to lobbyists; political ad buys; and more. Coverage from 1998 to the present.
• State Campaign Finance Legislation Database – produced by the National Conference of State Legislatures, this database contains state legislation related to campaign finance processes and reform. Bills found here deal with campaign contribution limits, disclosure requirements, independent expenditure requirements and other campaign finance-related issues from 2015 onward. Bill information for the current year is updated each Tuesday. To view bills from previous years, visit NCSL’s Campaign Finance Legislation Database 1999-2013 and Campaign Finance Legislation Database 2014.

Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites and from Jeremy Darrington's American Politics Research Guide, Princeton University Libraries.