Tag Archives: Congressional communication

As many of our readers know, government information includes critical but often “grey” or ephemeral information including communications between our elected officials and their constituents. Here’s a very cool project called DCinbox, a database of Congressional e-newsletters. Lindsey Cormack, professor of politic at Stevens Institute of Technology, has been collecting Congressional e-newsletters since 2009. There are nearly 90,000 unique e-newsletters in the database — which is both searchable and available as a full dataset! This is a rich dataset that can help analyze partisan differences and ideology in all kinds of policy matters.

Congressional e-newsletters. For more than a decade, political scientist Lindsey Cormack’s DCinbox project has collected “every official e-newsletter sent by sitting members of the U.S. House and Senate.” You can search the corpus online and also download all the emails as a series of CSV files, grouped by month. For each of the 130,000+ mailings, the files provide the date, subject, body, and sender’s Bioguide ID. (April 2020 was the highest-volume month, with more than 2,300 messages, nearly all of them mentioning the coronavirus.)

HT to Data is Plural 2021.03.03 edition. Please subscribe to their weekly newsletter and see all of the datasets that they have highlighted in previous newsletters!