Volume 29, Number 2, July 2006

 

Civil Rights Documentation Project

The landmark civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s has attracted considerable scholarly attention, deservedly so. Much of the analysis of this legislation has centered on the social and cultural conditions that gave birth to such laws as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As valuable as the emphasis on the civil rights movement has been, an equally vital chapter has been neglected -- the story of the legislative process itself. The Dirksen Congressional Center has posted a new feature on "CongressLink" that provides a fuller accounting of law-making based on the unique archival resources housed at The Center, including the collection of then-Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-IL), widely credited with securing the passage of the bills.

Intended to serve the needs of teachers and students, The Civil Rights Documentation Project demonstrates that Congress is capable of converting big ideas into powerful law, that citizen engagement is essential to that process, and that the public policies produced forty years ago continue to influence our lives.

The project takes the form of an interactive, Web-based presentation with links to digitized historical materials and other Internet-based resources about civil rights legislation created by museums, historical societies, and government agencies.

Please contact Cindy Koeppel at the Dirksen Center if you have any ideas or comments about this new feature.


Congress to Campus Program

The United States Association of Former Members of Congress

The Congress to Campus Program is designed to address several aspects of the civic learning and engagement deficit among the country’s college-age young people, combining traditional educational content with a strong message about public service. The Program sends bipartisan pairs of former Members of Congress - one Democrat and one Republican - to visit college, university and community college campuses around the country. Over the course of each visit, the Members conduct classes, hold community forums, meet informally with students and faculty, visit high schools and civic organizations, and do interviews and talk show appearances with local press and media.

In the summer of 2002, the Board of Directors of the U. S. Association of Former Members of Congress (USAFMC) engaged the Center for Democracy & Citizenship (CDC) at the Council for Excellence in Government to help manage the Congress to Campus Program in partnership with the Stennis Center for Public Service (Stennis). CDC and Stennis, with the blessing of the USAFMC, agreed to undertake a number of initiatives to greatly increase the number of campuses hosting program visits each year, expand the pool of former Members of Congress available for campus visits, develop new sources of funding, raise the profile of the program and its message in the public and academic community, and devise methods of measuring the impact of the program at host institutions.

[To access full report on Congress to Campus, click here.]


Congressional Bills Project

A new website at http://www.congressionalbills.org allows academic researchers, students, and the general public to download information about public and private bills introduced in the U.S. Congress along with information about those bills' sponsors.
 
Each record is a bill. The download tool allows you to select a large number of related variables to include in your download request. Obviously, limited requests will download more quickly. 

The website is a work in progress by John D. Wilkerson and Scott Adler at University of Washington, Seattle. 

Data on Legislative Voting and Representation

Professor John Carey has established a website at Dartmouth that includes various resources from his field research and data collection in an organized data archive. Of particular significance is the data from a project on legislative voting and representation. That project includes:
Visitors are invited to use any of the data, qualitative or quantitative, that is available on the site. The address of the website is http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jcarey/dataarchive.htm.  Professor Carey's email address, in case of questions, suggestions, or problems related to the data, is john.carey@dartmouth.edu.

Dirksen Center Congressional Research Grants

The Dirksen Congressional Center invites applications for grants in 2007 to fund research on congressional leadership and the U.S. Congress. 

The competition is open to individuals with a serious interest in studying Congress. Political scientists, historians, biographers, scholars of public administration or American studies, and journalists are among those eligible. The Center encourages graduate students who have successfully defended their dissertation prospectus to apply and awards a significant portion of the funds for dissertation research.

The awards program does not fund undergraduate or pre-Ph.D. study. Organizations are not eligible. Research teams of two or more individuals are eligible.

There is no standard application form. Applicants are responsible for showing the relationship between their work and the awards program guidelines. Applications are accepted at any time. Incomplete applications will NOT be forwarded to the screening committee for consideration.

All application materials must be received no later than February 1, 2007.  Awards will be announced in March 2007. Complete information about eligibility and application procedures may be found at The Center's Web site: http://www.dirksencenter.org/print_grants_CRAs.htm. 

The Center, named for the late Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen, is a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit research and educational organization devoted to the study of Congress and its leaders.
       
For more information about the Congressional Research Awards, contact Frank Mackaman by email at
fmackaman@dirksencenter.org or phone 309.347.7113

Election Results Archive

Center on Democratic Performance at Binghamton University

The Center on Democratic Performance at Binghamton University is pleased to announce the launch of the Election Results Archive (ERA), a collection of electronic files containing data on election results from around the world.  This unique online database with global coverage provides researchers, policy-makers, scholars, and others interested in elections with information on over 900 elections from around the world.  It includes information on the following:
  • Types of Elections: Results for presidential and national legislative elections.
  • Countries: The Archive currently contains election results from 134 countries that have met a minimum threshold of democratic performance for the year in which the elections took place. 
  • Dates of Elections: The ERA contains results back to 1974, This date was selected because it is frequently cited as a beginning point of the recent phase of democratic expansion (democratic elections in Greece and Portugal).

More election data will be added to this Archive as time and resources permit.

The archive can be searched by country, region, or year and type of election.  Please visit the archive at http://cdp.binghamton.edu/era/index.html

European Consortium for Political Research

ECPR has a new standing group on Parliaments, coordinated by Shane Martin, University of California, San Diego) and Matti Wiberg (University of Turku).

For a number of years the study of legislatures has concentrated on the US Congress. Parliaments in Europe have not been a subject of investigation to any comparable extent. Nevertheless, the body of knowledge is ever expanding on both the long-standing parliaments in Europe and the new institutions of the European Union and Central and Eastern Europe.

The Standing Group's aim is to promote comparative research and theory-building on the institutionalisation, capacity, operation, and performance of legislatures and the dissemination of such research.

For more information, and to register for membership (which is free) please see the web site at: http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/standinggroups/parliaments/index.htm


International Political Science Review


The International Political Science Review, the official journal of the International Political Science Association edited by Kay Lawson and James Meadowcroft, would be pleased to receive quality submissions likely to be of interest to its international readership from the members of Legislative Studies Section of the American Political Science Association.

The IPSR is committed to publishing material that makes a significant contribution to international political science. It seeks to meet the needs of political scientists throughout the world who are interested in studying political phenomena in the contemporary context of increasing international interdependence and global change.

IPSR reflects the aims and intellectual tradition of its parent body, the International Political Science Association: to foster the creation and dissemination of rigorous political inquiry free of subdisciplinary or other orthodoxy. We welcome work by scholars who are focussing on currently controversial themes, shaping innovative concepts of methodologies of political analysis, and striving to reach outside the scope of a single culture.

Authors interested in submitting their work should consult either a recent copy of the journal or http://ipsr.sagepub.com and follow submission guidelines, sending electronic copies to both klawson@sfsu.edu and jmeadowc@connect.carleton.ca. 
Preliminary queries are welcome.



Parliamentary  Representation in the Internet Age

Economic and Social Research Institute, University of Salford, UK
ESRI has announced a new research project that looks into parliamentarians' use of internet based technologies in the UK and Australia. In particular, they are examining the role of new technologies in shaping the work of MPs and the nature of parliamentary representation. The project is wide ranging, looking at a number of complementary issues, and does involve a range of research activities and methodologies:
  • Regular analyses of parliamentary/MPs websites to assess the function of such sites (over the next two years);
  • Postal surveys of parliamentarians to gauge the attitude toward, and importance of, Internet communication and online participation;
  • Interviews with MPs to understand Internet communication strategies, and their associated benefits and problems;
  • Public opinion survey to evaluate citizen awareness, usage and problems of internet communication with representatives;
  • Focus group assessment of the design and content of parliamentary websites.

For more information, visit the web site at http://www.ipop.org.uk or contact Wainer Lusoli by email at s.lusoli@salford.ac.uk.
State Politics and Policy Quarterly Archive

Announcing the roll out of the new on-line, full-text State Politics and Policy Quarterly Archive.  Every article in every issue of SPPQ is now on-line in pdf format, accessible free of charge to SPPQ subscribers and those whose university libraries subscribe.  Furthermore, non-subscribers may purchase a time-limited “research pass” for a reasonable price.

To access this archive, go to: http://sppq.press.uiuc.edu/sppqindex.html <http://sppq.press.uiuc.edu/sppqindex.html>  and follow the links on the tables of contents to the articles. When you find an article you wish to view, click on the “view pdf” button at the bottom of its page.  If your library subscribes to SPPQ, you will be sent straight to the article in pdf format.  If your library does not subscribe (or if you are connecting from off campus), do one of the following:

1. If you are an individual SPPQ subscriber, set up a personal access account.  Simply register with SPPQ by using your personal subscription ID number, as shown on your journal mailing label (note: save your mailing envelope to get your subscriber number).  Alternatively, you can contact the SPPQ access helpdesk at sppq@merlyn.press.uiuc.edu and request your subscriber number.

2. If you are an institutional SPPQ subscriber, you should have already received access to full on-line content automatically. Your on-campus computers can access the archive automatically through the use of institutional IP numbers and, therefore, your students and faculty do not need to login personally. If your institution subscribes to the paper journal but you find that you cannot access the full-text on-line version from your campus, please ask your librarian to fill out the Online IP Registration Form at http://sppq.press.uiuc.edu/ip_submit.html, which will add their institutional IP numbers to the SPPQ control system.

If you have any questions or difficulties accessing the State Politics and Policy Quarterly Archive, please contact the University of Illinois Press SPPQ help desk at: sppq@merlyn.press.uiuc.edu.


The Thicket at State Legislatures
The National Conference of State Legislatures has established a new blog, The Thicket at State Legislatures, about the legislative instution and federalism.  By and for legislative junkies, the blog includes these categories: American Democracy, Budgets, Congress, Courts and Legislatures, Elections, Ethics, Executives and Legislatures, Federalism, Initiative and Referendum, Leadership, Legislation, Legislative culture, Legislative Staff, Legislators, Media, NCSL, Redistricting, and Term Limits.


Visiting Scholars Program

APSA Centennial Center for Political Science & Public Affairs

The American Political Science Association recently opened the Centennial Center for Political Science & Public Affairs in its headquarters building in Washington, D.C.  As part of its programs, the Centennial Center assists scholars from the United States and abroad whose research and teaching would benefit from a stay in and access to the incomparable resources available in the nation's capital.  The Center provides to Visiting Scholars the infrastructure needed to conduct their work, including furnished work space with computer, phone, fax, conference space, and library access.

The Center has space to host 10 scholars for extended periods of time, ranging from weeks to months.  Space for shorter "drop-in" stays is also available.  Scholars are expected to pursue their own research and teaching projects and contribute to the intellectual life of the residential community by sharing their work with Center colleagues in occasional informal seminars.

Eligibility is limited to APSA members.  Senior or junior faculty membes, post-doctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students are also strongly encouraged to apply.  A short applicationform is required, and submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis.  Positions are awarded based on space availability and relevant Center programming.

For more information and an application, please visit the Centennial Center web site <www.apsanet.org/centennialcenter> or call Sean Twombly at (202)483-2512.

Visiting Scholars Program

Carl Albert Center

The Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma seeks applicants for its Visiting Scholars Program, which provides financial assistance to researchers working at the Center's archives. Awards of $500 - $1000 are normally grantedas reimbursement for travel and lodging.

The Center's holdings include the papers of many former members of Congress, such as Robert S. Kerr, Fred Harris, and Speaker Carl Albert of Oklahoma; Helen Gahagan Douglas and Jeffery Cohelan of California; and Neil Gallagher of New Jersey. Besides the history of Congress, congressional leadership, national and Oklahoma politics, and election campaigns, the collections also document government policy affecting agriculture, Native Americans, energy, foreign affairs, the environment, the economy, and other areas.

Topics that can be studied include the Great Depression, flood control, soil conservation, and tribal affairs. At least one collection provides insight on women in American politics. Most materials date from the 1920s to the 1970s, although there is one nineteenth century collection.

The Center's archives are described on their website at http://www.ou.edu/special/albertctr/archives/ and in the publication titled A Guide to the Carl Albert Center Congressional Archives by Judy Day et.al. (Norman, Okla.: The Carl Albert Center, 1995), available at many U.S. academic libraries. Additional information can be obtained from the Center.

The Visiting Scholars Program is open to any applicant. Emphasis is given to those pursuing postdoctoral research in history, political science, and other fields. Graduate students involved in research for publication, thesis, or dissertation are encouraged to apply. Interested undergraduates and lay researchers are also invited to apply. The Center evaluates each research proposal based upon its merits, and funding for a variety of topics is expected.

No standardized form is needed for application. Instead, a series of documents should be sent to the Center, including:
(1)  a description of the research proposal in fewer than 1000 words;
(2)  a personal vita;
(3)  an explanation of how the Center's resources will assist the researcher;
(4)  a budget proposal; and
(5)  a letter of reference from an established scholar in the discipline attesting to the significance of the research.
Applications are accepted at any time.

For more information, please contact:  Archivist, Carl Albert Center, 630 Parrington Oval, Room 101, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019.  Telephone: (405) 325-5835.  FAX: (405) 325-6419.  Email: cacarchives@ou.edu


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