LibGuides: * Political Science & International Relations: Policy

Policy aggregators

Policy Commons This link opens in a new window
Access research, policy reports, and other grey literature from think tanks, research institutes, nongovernmental organizations, and more.
PolicyFile This link opens in a new window
Research publications from U.S. and international think tanks, university research programs, research organizations and publishers
Includes demographic, business and census data with abstracts and updated weekly. Profile provides users with web links to contributing organization's home page, email address, scholar biographies and full text.
ProQuest Congressional This link opens in a new window
Be sure to select "Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports 2004-Present" as the document type on the toolbar on the left.
Also includes full text of the Congressional Record, legislative histories, committee information, member biographies, legislative news, the U.S. code, court decisions and the Congressional Information Service (CIS) index.

everycrsreport.com
CRS Reports available to the public. Reports are arranged by policy topics and are keyword searchable.
Find Policy
Search for topics in leading policy research organizations.
Foreign Policy Research Institute
Policy Archive
Includes public policy research containing over 30,000 documents. Documents are authored by think tanks, NGOs, CRS and university centers.
Stateline - Pew Research Daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy

Think Tanks

Think tanks are policy research institutes that engage in policy research and analysis, and often advocate solutions. Many think tanks are non-profit organizations promoting social and economic justice and reforms, while others are funded institutes partisan in purpose providing solutions to the best interest of funding agencies, political parties and governments, etc.

American Policy Directory (Univ. of Oregon)
From the University of Oregon Libraries, search think tank sites grouped by topic.
findpolicy.org
Search think tank sites grouped by topic. Search page focuses on 14 leading think tanks that work on "public policy" (education, law & justice, urban issues, and many more) with a focus on the United States.
NIRA's World Directory of Think Tanks (NWDTT)
Directory of think tanks indexed by country.
Think Tank Rankings (Univ. of Pennsylvania)
TTCSP Global Go To Think Tank Index
TTCSP Global Go To Think Tank Reports Index
the result of an international survey of over 1,950 scholars, public and private donors, policy makers, and journalists who helped rank more than 6,500 think tanks using a set of 18 criteria developed by the TTCSP.
Think Tank Repository (EU)
Repository of think tank publications on EU affairs from the Library of the General Secretariat of the Council of the EU.
Think Tank Search (Harvard)
A Google Custom Search of more than 700 think tanks and research centers. Plus information on evaluating think tanks.
NCSL State Policy Research
Covers a variety of areas ranging from agriculture and budget and tax issues and education to health care and immigration and transportation.

Political Speeches & Public Statements

American Presidency Project Searchable database of the Papers of the Presidents.
American Presidency Project - Proclamations A database of proclamations (and related directives), searchable by President, year, proclamation number, and issue category.
Presidential Speech Archive - Miller Center of Public Affairs Extensive collection of presidential speeches from the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
The White House Briefing Room Official White House site providing text, photos, and video of statements, speeches, remarks, proclamations, executive orders, etc.
Project Vote Smart: Public Statements A collection of public statements and press releases from public officials and candidates, both nationally and at the state level and for various offices.
Presidential Rhetoric Site containing text of major speeches by presidents and presidential candidates, from Washington to the present.
American Rhetoric - Speech Bank Large collection of speeches, both political and not, in mp3, PDF, and html formats.
Websites for Political Speeches Collection of links by a researcher at Wake Forest University to additional speech sources. No longer updated, but may be worth checking for additional sources.
State of the State Speeches Archive Archive of state of the state speeches by governors in all 50 states 2002-2011.

Finding Grey literature & Open Web Resources - Advanced Searching Tips

Hierarchy of grey literature denoting the varying degrees of information control and known expertise of the author.

The open web provides a plethora of resources for finding information about and from governmental and non-govermental organizations working to address issues surrounding your topic of research as well as grey literature.

What is grey literature?
Information published by entities (researchers or those working in the field) whose main purpose is NOT publishing (e.g. government and non-government organizations, think tanks, scholarly societies and associations, etc. Grey literature might be technical documentation, white papers, working papers, symposia, bulletins, unpublished works, technical reports, fact sheets, standards, patents and the like. Watch this video for more info.)

Why is grey literature important?
A large amount of public policy information is published as grey literature.

Below are a few advanced Google searching tips for find grey literature:

Try using Google Advanced Search
Google ignores the word AND as a search operator. But, typing OR in all caps will find similar or related terms [e.g. "racial segregation" OR "modern segregation" OR "concentrated poverty"].
Include search terms like report OR analysis OR summary OR overview OR data
Search for a particular document type [e.g. denver (hispanic OR latino) population filetype:xls].
Search at particular site [e.g. site:.rochester.edu OR site:cityofrochester.gov OR site:census.gov OR pewresearch.org].
Search a particular domain [e.g. site:.gov OR site:.org OR site:.uk See a full list of country code domains].
Exclude words by using the "-" sign in front of the word you wish to exclude [e.g. denver (hispanic OR latino) -migrants].
Limit to a particular date range using before:YYYY-MM-DD or after:YYYY-MM-DD [e.g. metoo (Dobbs OR abortion) site:twitter.com after:2022-06-24 before:2022-06-30]

Image source: Kamei, F. et al., (2020) under a CC BY 4.0 license

Additional Resources

PolicyMap (Public Edition)
Easy-to-use online mapping with data on demographics, real estate, health, jobs and more.
C-SPAN video library
Browse by date, congressional committee, type of event, etc.
Every C-SPAN program aired since 1987. Indexed and searchable by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, location, and in many cases the full text of closed caption trancriptions.
Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
The CBO analyzes the impact of policy changes on budgetary matters. Particularly good for analysis of important bills going through congress.
Court Listener
search millions of court opinions by case name, topic, or citation database uses files shared via a “Recap” browser allowing those who subscribe to the PACER court document distribution information service. Many of the cases are free.
Federation of American Scientists CRS reports Congressional Research Service (CRS)
Provides reports to members of Congress on topics relevant to current political events. Congress requires that CRS not make them directly available to the public FAS is one of several groups that collaborate to get & post them.
Government Accountability Office (GAO)
Investigates how well government programs operate. Select the "key issues" tab to see current policy analysis by topic.
procon.org
Analysis of current policy issues with both pro and con analysis.