It is mind-bogglingly easy to be misinformed about politics. In fact, there is often a direct incentive for people to be confused about what is going on and how the system works. Any candidate can promise the world on a platter to their voting base and win. This is significantly harder if there are people in the audience who know that the president isn’t all-powerful or that they can look up how their senator voted for any particular law. Part of this is that the general education system doesn’t emphasize citizenship or government operation in social studies programs as much as they say and instead emphasizes how cool George Washington was. However, to understand how Congress itself runs, people need to understand what individual legislators stand for. How they vote, what they propose, and how they run this country.
This is where projects such as DCinbox, run by Stevens professor of political science, Dr. Lindsey Cormack, come into play. DCinbox is a large database composed of all the newsletters sent by every single member of the Senate and House. It contains years worth of data, and is current up through current day, sorted by year and month, and follows its intended purpose perfectly. Information like this is absolutely critical for understanding how Congress is run and how each congressman and woman presents themselves to their constituents. It is incredibly useful, not just to researchers in political science but potentially to normal people who want to be more informed on specific issues.
To use New Jersey as an example, currently, NJ has 12 members in the House of Representatives and two senators. If you want to know more about how the people who represent you and your neighbors in government think, vote, and represent your specific issue, you would have to subscribe to 14 different newsletters to figure out who believes what. This is objectively an insane thing to do when our emails are already bombarded with constant spam and advertisements. What if you wanted to learn more about what Cory Booker thought about Bob Menendez doing the most New Jersey crime imaginable (taking bribery in the form of gold bars and sewing said gold bars into his suits to hide them)? No one should have to deal with constant “Vote for Me” and “Donate Now!” emails for the crime of being curious. Now, to be clear, that information is not in the current version as this work takes a long time to catalog, but it is invaluable when it comes to research and understanding who our representatives are and if we still want them to represent us.
