About the Project

The Congress Project provides stories and context behind important legislation considered by the U.S. Congress. It also provides links to published research readers can consult for further information. These stories and context most commonly take the form of detailed legislative histories written by undergraduate researchers and edited by faculty. In other cases, it may be a set of assorted notes, citations to other work related to the measure and other information.

Under the direction of Professor Anthony Madonna, the website is still in its early stages. We have over 60 written legislative histories and over 2,000 sets of assorted notes that we will be systematically posting here starting on June 15, 2018.

Since 2010, the University of Georgia Congress Project has sought to expose undergraduate students to data collection and political science research on congressional politics. Working in conjunction with Professor Michael Lynch, we teach a small course (5-20 students) each semester related to congressional politics. The course is integrated with a broader research project that attempts to model the roll call generating process by examining amendments dispensed with on the floor of the United States Congress from 1877-2014. In accordance with the policies established by the University of Georgia's Center for Undergraduate Research (CURO), students are asked to spend five hours a week collecting data on the congressional amending process. Students are assigned a set of important pieces of congressional legislation and is tasked with reading through congressional debates over the measure through an online version of the Congressional Record.

The project has been serviced by 108 separate undergraduates, 17 graduate students and three high school students. To date, students have collected data on 150,415 amendments to 2,322 landmark enactments across 69 congresses. Data collected by students in the project has led to 17 separate conference paper presentations—seven co-authored with undergraduate students and five co-authored with graduate students—one published paper co-authored with an undergraduate, one forthcoming book chapter co-authored with an undergraduate and two published papers co-authored with graduate students. Undergraduate students participating in the project have also been active with independent undergraduate research, winning 10 CURO research awards and making 14 presentations at the UGA CURO Symposium. Preliminary data from the project has been published in the U.S. News and World Report , the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage Blog, and online in conjunction with the R Street Institute.

In addition to coding data on the lawmaking process, students are required to complete a paper analyzing the passage of a “landmark piece” of American legislation. It is our hope that this paper will eventually become part of broader project on American lawmaking and published on a website accessible to the general public. In recent years, scholars of congressional politics have made great strides in generating important new datasets on congressional activity. Consistent with efforts to make congressional politics more transparent, these scholars have made their data available online. However, data alone is likely insufficient for members of the general public interested in congressional lawmaking. Most casual observers of politics are unlikely to download a dataset and analyze it. Making readable landmark bill histories available, however, should aide both scholars and journalists as well as enrich the knowledge of the general public.