17.251, Introduction to Congressional Politics

Fall 2008

Course syllabus, handouts, and assignments (These all require Adobe Acrobat Reader)

Syllabus Revised schedule Problem set # 1: Do problems 1-4 & 11 at the end of Chapter 1. Due WEDNESDAY, Sept. 17, 2008 Problem set # 1 answers Paper assignment, due December 5, 2008 2002 midterm, for practice Midterm answer key Problem set # 2 Due Monday, Nov. 24, 2008 @ 11:59pm JPG version of problem set figure

Lecture handouts
-Unidimensional spatial model PowerPoint pdf
-Constitution pdf
-Origins & development of Congress pdf
-Congressional candidates pdf
-Congressional voters pdf
-Redistricting pdf
-Campaign finance pdf
-Multidimensional spatial model pdf
-Parties and leadership pdf
-Committees pdf
-Floor procedures and roll call voting pdf

The House of Representatives and the Senate have their own Web pages. Lots of stuff here.

Thomas, which is a service of the Library of Congress, is another great site.  Of particular interest is the Government Resources link.

The House Rules Committee hosts an indispensable site that gathers together the Congressional Research service reports on the legislative process.  This is the collection of information about the nuts and bolts of legislation.

Digitized and searchable fascimiles of early congressional documents is available at the Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation site. Totally cool! You can also search the House and Senate Journals up to the 42nd Congress (up to 1873), in addition to other documents.

The Center for Legislative Archives of the National Archives and Records Administration keeps old original congressional records that you can travel to DC to do research on. This site is also useful for doing research far away from D.C.

C-SPAN to see live television from the floor of the House and Senate

Roll Call is the "home town newspaper" of Capitol Hill. Information ranging from straight news to hometown gossip. The Hill is an upstart competitor that's a little edgier.

The Dirksen Center has created a site called CongressLink, which contains a mixture of good congressional links and academic exercises. It now hosts TheCongressBlog as a daily resource for teachers and students of Congress.

Campaign finance

The Federal Election Commission. regulates campaign finance for federal elections and is the primary source of election finance data. As an aside, Hans Von Spakovsky is a controversial former-member of the FEC who received his Political Science undergraduate degree from MIT in 1981.

The Campaign Finance Institute site is very useful, particularly in providing an on-line version of the campaign finance tables that are published in Vital Statistics on Congress, 2001-2002. (Vital Statistics is an indispensable reference source for any student of American politics.

CQ's Moneyline is a great news and data source concerning money in federal politics.

The Center for Responsive Politics Open Secrets has a lot of information about individual MCs, particularly information about campaign finance.

The Almanac of American Politics is a tremendous resource that gives detailed information about congressional districts, members of Congress, and local politics. This is perhaps my favorite reference book.

My own congressional data, including recent updates to my standing committee data.

The Dirksen Center honors the memory of Sen. Everett M. Dirksen. It has grants and educational programs that are of some interest to the professional and student, alike. Their CongressLink page has a lot of resources that are helpful to teachers and students of Congress.

Lexis-Nexis: Congressional provides great access to the full text of congressional proceedings, reaching back at least 25 years. This provides direct access to most congressional documents. The link is available to MIT users only.

Keith Poole at the University of California, San Diego has the most interesting and useful roll call information up and running for recent years at his Voteview site. (I hope Keith doesn't mind putting his home page on mine...) There is a more direct link to his NOMINATE data download page.

David Lublin, at American University, has posted his congressional district data.

While it's not data -- it's software -- the PoliSim election simulator provides a pretty neat visualization of how spatial models of electoral competition work. (The page is now about 12 years old and written in Java 1.0. Please take the fellow up on his challenge to update it.)

The Legislative Studies Section of the American Political Science Association has its own home page, including the electronic version of its newsletter and other legislative links.

The Legislative Studies Quarterly is the official journal of the Legislative Studies Section. It's a highly-respected journal, and contains the most current research on legislatures of all types. You can access back issues through JSTOR. You must consult current issue the old fashioned way.

WashU hosts a great list of links to national parliaments.