Congress

A conversation with the director of the Center's Data Labs team on their new report on congressional communications and the uses and misuses of "big data."

A new analysis of more than 200,000 press releases and Facebook posts from the official accounts of members of the 114th Congress uses methods from the emerging field of computational social science to quantify how often legislators themselves “go negative” in their outreach to the public.

Survey Report As President Trump prepares for his address next week to a joint session of Congress, Republicans say they are more inclined to trust the president, rather than GOP congressional leaders, if the two sides disagree. For their part, Democrats are far more concerned that congressional Democrats will not do enough,  rather than go […]

The share of U.S. adults who describe themselves as Christians has been declining for decades, but the U.S. Congress is about as Christian today as it was in the early 1960s.

Although the movement to limit congressional terms has been largely dormant for the past two decades, 15 states do limit how many terms their own legislators can serve.

Big partisan shifts in the House of Representatives happen, but not often. In only three of the past 12 election cycles has one party posted a net gain of more than 30 seats, and on average 93% of House members who seek re-election are voted back into office.

In 2012, only 26 House districts out of 435 chose one party's presidential nominee and the other party's candidate for the House.

Between 2009 and 2014, the number of Washington-based reporters for local newspapers accredited by the Senate to cover Congress declined by 11%.

Congress passed 113 laws, 87 of them substantive, in 2015, making it the most productive first session since 2009.