DCinbox

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I started DCinbox in 2009 when I was a graduate student at NYU. This project collects, archives, and makes publicly available every official e-newsletter sent by sitting members of the US Congress. 

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Along the way I've had assistance from numerous research assistants including: Sumeet Gajri, Antonino Gancitano, Nick Monzillo, Kirsten Meidlinger, Stephen McArdle, Ali Hameed, Laina Emmons, and Aidan Fischer. The project has also benefited from volunteered help from Dave Bour, Simon Willison, and Runxin Gao.

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These communications are crafted and sent by nearly every member of Congress, yet until 2009 there was no comprehensive set to use in research. This database is updated in real time, as members of Congress send constituent messages, and provides researchers with a systematic set of texts to examine the strategic choices that legislators and their staff make in crafting the content. Today, there are nearly 140,000 unique e-newsletters.

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If you are a researcher interested in these data please see the full dataset and explore away! If you want to use this data for publication purposes, let me know!  If you ever have questions along the way, please feel free to email me at lcormack@stevens.edu.

 

On Twitter, you can also check out @dcinbox to see where this research is headed.

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This project is continually a work in progress. If ever you have an idea or a need for any of the communications data please feel free to contact me and I'll get things to you as soon as possible.

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These data have been used to explore:

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• How Have Members of Congress Reacted to President Trump’s Trade Policy?

• Partisan Policymaking in the Extended Party Network: The Case of Cap and Trade Regulations

• Click to subscribe: interest group emails as a source of data

• Party Sub‐Brands and American Party Factions

• Manipulative tactics are the norm in political emails

• The Electoral Consequences of Roll Call Voting: Health Care and the 2018 Election

• The Virus of Fear: The Political Impact of Ebola in the US

• The House Freedom Caucus: Extreme Faction Influence in the US Congress

• Gender, Partisanship, and Women's Issues in Congressional Communication

• Passing the Buck in Congress: The Extent and Effectiveness of Blaming Others for Inaction

• Partisan differences in attention to veterans as a topic in official communications. Republicans tend to talk way more about veterans in official communications than Democrats do, despite the fact that democrats offer more veteran focused legislation.

• How members of Congress try to shift their ideological appearances to constituents by attempting to moderate or extremize their communicated votes based on district preferences.

• The differences in vote revelation strategies of men and women within Congress. Punch line: women discuss their votes in constituent communications more often than men do.

• The signaled networks of members of Congress in their official communication.

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