CAPPP Faculty are engaged in a wide range of research projects. Some of these projects (listed below) are designed in part to serve the broader research and teaching communities.
Research
Congressional Bills Project (CBP) – The CBP archives extensive information about all Congressional bills introduced since 1946. It is used by scholars to study a wide range of questions related to legislative processes and policymaking.
Policy Agendas Project (PAP) – The PAP classifies an extensive set of federal government activities by policy topic, allowing for analyses of issue attention and policy change from 1947 to the present.
Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) – The CAP is an international project involving scholars from more than a dozen nations (and counting!). The purpose of the project is to develop common metrics for studying issue attention and policy change across nations.
PoliInformatics (PINet) – PINet is a recently established Research Coordination Network (RCN). The purpose of PINet is to promote interest in government data among scholars representing a wide range of disciplines. It is anticipated that PINet will promote greater understanding of government and greater accessibility to government information for citizens.
Teaching
LegSim – CAPPP has been developing and sharing technology for instruction since 2002. LegSim is a virtual legislature that students at the college and high school levels use to learn about legislative process and politics. The instructor creates it, and students run it.
Tools for Text – In 2010, CAPPP sponsored a workshop supported by the NSF and the Society for Political Methodology, the purpose of which was to introduce graduate students and junior faculty to the analysis of text as data. We anticipate updating this site over the next few months to include valuable resources for scholars interested in learning how to scrape, process and analyze digitized text documents. For more information, please contact John Wilkerson.