A New Way // Journalism In The Public Interest > Keeping You Informed

A New Way to Keep an Eye on Who Represents You in Congress

by Derek Willis
ProPublica, April 28, 2016, 11:10 a.m.

Today ProPublica is launching a new interactive database that will help you keep track of the officials who represent you in Congress.
The project is the continuation of two projects I worked on at The New York Times — the first is the Inside Congress database, which we are taking over at ProPublica starting today.
But we also have big plans for it. While the original interactive database at The Times focused on bills and votes, our new project adds pages for each elected official, where you can find their latest votes, legislation they support and statistics about their voting. As we move forward we want to add much more data to help you understand how your elected officials represent you, the incentives that drive them and the issues they care about.

This isn’t the only congressional data site out there, and our goal is to send visitors to other sites that offer valuable features. That’s why we’re linking to individual lawmaker and bill pages on GovTrack and C-SPAN, for example. Like GovTrack, our news app will provide some calculated metrics that visitors can use to help learn more about their representatives. We also have vote cartograms that show not only how each lawmaker voted but the relative clout of delegations.
That’s where you come in - we’d like to know what kinds of congressional information would make it easier to hold Congress accountable for its actions (or inactions)? Would more comparisons between lawmakers’ votes and legislative proposals be helpful? We’re currently showing recent bills by subject, but are there other ways of organizing information about bills that would be useful? What do you want to know about the activities of Congress?
Please let us know — either in the comments below or by sending me an email at derek.willis@propublica.org.
Selected excerpts from this source: ProPublica