Is there a correlation between the public’s interest in the economy and the number of congressional hearings on the topic? After the Republicans became the majority in the House in 1994, was there an increase or a decrease in the number of public laws passed? What happened to federal education spending and public attention to education after the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2001? These questions and more can be answered using the Policy Agendas Project website.
The Policy Agendas Project is an online data resource center from the University of Texas at Austin that collects and organizes data pertaining to national policymaking activity since WWII. It allows you to track and compare data from multiple government institutions, the media, and the public on a wide range of national policy issues on topics such as law, civil rights and liberties, banking, economics, education, social welfare, energy, and the environment.
You can download datasets for your own analysis or use the site’s interactive trend analysis tool to create graphs. Datasets cover legislative material (Congressional hearings, public laws, roll call votes, and articles from the Congressional Quarterly) as well as U. S. Supreme Court cases, Executive Orders, and State of the Union addresses. Stories from the New York Times and Gallup opinion poll data are also included.
