DCinbox is academically derived project headed by me, Prof. Lindsey Cormack, with the assistance of 2 NYU undergrads, 8 Stevens Institute of Technology undergrads, and 1 professional Technical Lead.

Starting in 2009, as a graduate student at the NYU Wilf family department of politics, I set up a small database to capture and house every official e-newsletter sent by sitting members of the U.S. House and Senate. For a detailed description of the ins and outs of the project, please see this from The Legislative Scholar.

These communications are 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 192,527 unique e-newsletters.

If you are a researcher interested in these data please use what you like here. A static set of downloads of the data are available month by month here. If you ever have questions along the way, please feel free to email me at lcormack@stevens.edu. You can also check out @dcinbox on Twitter to see where this research is headed.

To date, these data have been used to explore:

• 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
• How members of different parties discuss environmental issues
• How members of Congress reacted to President Trump's trade policy
• Congressional efforts to conduct and communicate oversight of Medicare and Medicaid
• Partisan Policymaking in the Extended Party Network: The Case of Cap and Trade Regulations
• The Virus of fear: The political impact of Ebola in the US
• The House Freedom Caucus: Extreme Faction Influence in the US Congress
• Party Sub‐Brands and American Party Factions
• The Electoral Consequences of Roll Call Voting: Health Care and the 2018 Election
• Gender, Partisanship, and Women's Issues in Congressional Communication
• Passing the Buck in Congress: The Extent and Effectiveness of Blaming Others for Inaction

Notice Something Missing?

If you have a particular e-newsletter you are searching for and can't find it here, that doesn't mean we don't have it. A few of the e-newsletters are encoded in ways that do not easily port to our backend processes. If in doubt, please feel free to email me at lcormack@stevens.edu and I'll double check for you.