Research on Congress and on the dynamics of the legislative process in the United States is hampered by the lack of significant short term variation in important aspects of the legislative process. For example, although the structure of the congressional committee system is believed to be important in determining the operation of Congress, the fact that the structure of the committee system has changed only very little over the past half century makes analysis of the effects of committee structure difficult to study using contemporary data. To compensate for this problem congressional scholars have turned increasingly to history. Specifically, by studying congressional change over longer periods of time it is possible to observe greater variation in key concepts and variables. The problem, however, is that systematic and reliable data have not been collected on many aspects of Congress for the years prior to about 1950. This award supports a planning conference of congressional scholars to study the feasibility of developing a comprehensive, multi-user, historical data base on congressional structure, process and composition. The conference will involve the leading scholars in the field and will seek agreement on the types of data that should be collected, the format a comprehensive data base should take, and on the types of questions that could be addresses if these data were collected. When completed this project will provide a much better understanding of the data needs and opportunities in this important area of Political Science.
