Government Oversight Dudes...

This year the U.S. House has continued on its path toward greater transparency, and this week in particular two developments are worth noting: The House’s committee on House Administration held its second annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, and they rebuked a report that suggested it was OK for the government to charge the public [...]

Members of Congress nowadays use numerous tools to inform the voting public about their opinions and activities. They tweet, post on Facebook, and send email updates. And they also use GovTrack, in a variety of ways. Some Members take advantage of the feeds our site offers, and embed them as a widget on their webpage. [...]

Here’s a list of some of the recent improvements to GovTrack. We started writing original summaries of select bills. Read them all here. Vice presidents now have pages on GovTrack. Remember that they cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate, like in this one. Tie-breaking votes now indicate which vice president was the one who cast the [...]

Last month we began adding original summaries of select legislation introduced in this Congress. Civic engagement in the legislative process requires not only that the public have access to legislation proposed in Congress, but also that they be able to understand it. However, bills can be extremely long and often consist primarily of cross-references to [...]

We’ve added historical information on bills from 1951-1978 and made some other improvements to the site recently. Here are the details: Using the Statutes at Large, the compilation of laws enacted by Congress, we’ve added enacted bills from 1951-1972 into GovTrack. For example, here’s Civil Rights Act of 1964 (H.R. 7151 in the 88th Congress). You can [...]

We’ve added a new Analysis Methodology page. This page provides details on our ideology, leadership, and prognosis analyses so that they can be understood better by our users and so they can be replicated by researchers in other domains. GovTrack pioneered three large-scale (i.e. BigData) statistical analyses of legislative information. You can find the results [...]

Yesterday the 113th Congress was sworn in and began filing bills. Here’s how that affects GovTrack and other updates to the site this week. For the 113th Congress: We updated our roster of Members of Congress and maps. New bills and votes began showing up on GovTrack today. The House and Senate haven’t posted committee [...]

Back in April we introduced “bill prognosis” (original post), a statistical analysis of how likely bills are to be enacted. Today we’re making a few improvements. Read on for more about it. For each bill (example: S. 3637), we compute a probability that the bill will be enacted and show the factors that help or [...]

From a new start page to improved maps, here’s what we’ve been working on this fall: There is a new Start page to find something to track and get email updates for, and you can now get email updates on full text keyword searches. So if you want to track something that is not one [...]

If you’re interested in the math behind some of our statistics — the ideology/leadership charts and the bill prognosis scores — you might find interesting a talk I gave last week. I had the opportunity to kick off the application development track at the Law Via the Internet (LVI) 2012 conference at the Cornell Law School [...]