Political Science: Executive Branch

Fabulous site containing lots of information on the presidency, especially a fully searchable database of the Papers of the Presidents back to Washington, the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (Carter to G.W. Bush), and the Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents (2009-current). Also has party platforms back to 1840, convention speeches, candidates' remarks, election debates back to 1960, executive orders and proclamations, presidential approval back to 1941, vetoes, state of the union addresses, press briefings, and more.

Be sure to see our U.S. History Librarian's guide to the major documentary collections and other records on each of the presidents.

Centralized site for searching across digital collections of presidential documents from a number of presidential libraries and documentary projects.

The most complete record of presidential proclamations known to exist, with proclamations from President George Washington to President Barack Obama (approximately 10,000 records and counting). Provides a database of proclamations (and related directives), searchable by President, year, proclamation number, and issue category.

Official White House site providing text, photos, and video of statements, speeches, remarks, proclamations, executive orders, etc.

Extensive collection of presidential speeches from the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Covers all administrations, many with audio and/or video.

Site by two professors (Baylor & Vanderbilt) containing text of major speeches by presidents and presidential candidates. Contains speeches back to Washington. Also contains a list, by president, of links to other sites with information on rhetoric and speeches of that president.

Executive orders come from the White House and direct the government's Executive Branch.

Presidential Memoranda are used to manage the Executive Branch, but are less formal than Executive Orders. They are issued by the President.

This site contains current Presidential actions.

This dataset attempts to be a comprehensive listing of all pardons granted by United States presidents from Washington to Trump. In total, the dataset contains 77 variables and 32,026 cases. The data includes variables that provide the recipient's name of the pardon, the date the pardon was granted, the offense committed, details regarding fines and prison stays, along with other details regarding the recipient.

Provides access to data on the immigration court caseloads and outcomes (including deportation proceedings); ICE detentions, removals, and facilities; immigration judges; and juvenile cases. Information on criminal enforcement of immigration law including statutes used is also available. Based upon analyses by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University of court and agency records obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Directory of agency specific FOIA sites as well as major collections of FOIA documents provided by non-governmental organizations. Courtesy of the UCSD Library.

Provides salary, title, agency, occupation, and demographic details about millions of U.S. government employees, as well as their migrations into, out of, and through the federal bureaucracy. Nearly 30 gigabytes in total. Obtained by BuzzFeed via a FOIA request to the Office of Personnel Management. Data are fixed-width and pipe-delimited text files. Fields include Name, agency, subagency, location, occupation, occupational category, age, education level, adjusted basic pay, pay plan and pay grade, type of appointment (e.g., “career,” “nonpermanent,” etc.), work schedule (e.g., full time, part-time seasonal, etc.), supervisory status.

Data received from a FOIA request for federal employee salary data from Fiscal Year 2004 to Fiscal Year 2018 Enterprise Human Resource Integration-Statistical Data Mart and Central Personnel Data File. The data elements include employee name, agency, agency sub-element, occupation, pay plan, grade, basic pay, adjusted basic pay, award, city, state, country, and duty station. Data is limited to Executive Branch Federal civilian employees and excludes Intelligence Agencies and Foreign Service Personnel at the State Department (included until March 2006). A separate file (heavily redacted) includes Department of Defense data for the same time period.

Data on vacant executive positions that require presidential appointment with Senate confirmation, 1992-present.

• vacancy indicators: start date, date reported to GAO, agency, position type
• nominee: name, nomination date, nomination status
• acting officials: name, start & end dates

Bulk data downloads of various Government Publishing Office collections, including: Congressional bills and bill summaries (113th Congress/2013-present), Code of Federal Regulations (1996-present), Federal Register (2000-present), Public Papers of the Presidents (2009-2011), and Supreme Court Decisions (1937-1975),

2009+

2007+

2014+.

• 2012-2015
• 1997-2011 (click the link for prior for pre-2011)

2009+

2009+

2011+

1997+

2009+

2009+

1993+

2007+

1998+ (selected back to 1970)

2009+

2006-present. There's a more complete archive for 1997-2011.

1996+

Spreadsheet with nearly 6000 national presidential approval ratings, from FDR through Trump (as of Sep. 2018). Earlier years are almost exclusively from Gallup; multiple sources from Bill Clinton forward. Data are at least quarterly for FDR, at least monthly through Reagan, and then at least weekly thereafter. In Excel format. Compiled by the Roper Center.

This 4th ed. of Vital Statistics has several spreadsheets covering presidential approval, including annual average, quarterly, weekly, and by month as well as some of those periods broken down by sex, race, income, education, region, and party.

Nearly all states covered from 1992-2008; select coverage for early years back to the mid-70s. Data collected by Thad Beyle, Lee Sigelman, and Richard Niemi; in .xls format.