David Smith

Why bill success in a lousy way to keep score in Congress

On Tuesday, February 4, the Washington Post published an article in which retiring representative Robert Andrews (D-NJ) was asked to defend the fact that none of the bills he sponsored over 20 years had become law. A bad measure (bill success) that previously garnered little public attention now seems to be trickling into the mainstream […]

Why bill success is a lousy way to keep score in Congress

Joshua Tucker: The following is a guest post from John Wilkerson and Nick Stramp of the University of Washington’s Department of Political Science and David Smith of the College of Computer and Information Sciences at Northeastern University. ***** On Tuesday, February 4, the Washington Post published an article in which retiring representative Robert Andrews (D-NJ) was asked to defend the fact that none […]

Here’s How Memes Went Viral — In the 1800s

The project expects to launch by the end of the month. When it does, researchers and the public will be able to comb through widely reprinted texts identified by mining 41,829 issues of 132 newspapers from the Library of Congress. While this first stage focuses on texts from before the Civil War, the project eventually […]