Library Research Guides: POL1 200: American Politics: Find News & Public Opinion

Polls & Surveys

Roper iPOLL
Searchable collection of 500,000 questions and answers from surveys collected by the major polling firms in the U.S. since 1935, with downloadable datasets.

Polling the Nations This link opens in a new window
Public opinion polls and surveys on current events around the world. Includes charts and survey questions.
Dates: 1986 CE to present
ICPSR: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research This link opens in a new window
Archive of research in the social and behavioral sciences, with collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, social media, and other fields. Includes a bibliography of publications related to data.

US Newsstream This link opens in a new window
One of the largest full text collections of newspapers from the United States, as well as news sites, blogs, and newswires. Includes The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal.
Dates: 1985 CE-Present
Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
Full text news articles (1980s onward, dates vary) from major papers, worldwide papers, and US city papers.
Alt-PressWatch This link opens in a new window
full-text articles from newspapers, magazines and journals of the alternative and independent press; 1995 onward
Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window
Full text newspapers, magazines, and journals from ethnic, minority and Native presses. Filter by ethnic group and language.
Dates: 1960 CE-Present

Interested in seeing how well-covered a topic is in the news media? Check out some of these sources.

Google Trends
Google Trends allows you to see the topics people are—or aren’t—following, practically in real time. Journalists can use this information to explore potential story ideas, and can also feature Trends data within news stories to illustrate a general level of interest in, say, a political candidate, social issue or event.

Political Science Database This link opens in a new window
Search for articles on your topic, adding "salience" as a key term.

GDELT Project
GDELT is the largest, most comprehensive, and highest resolution open database of human society ever created. Creating a platform that monitors the world's news media from nearly every corner of every country in print, broadcast, and web formats, in over 100 languages, every moment of every day and that stretches back to January 1, 1979 through present day, with daily updates, required an unprecedented array of technical and methodological innovations, partnerships, and whole new mindsets to bring this all together and make it a reality. Creating a database of a quarter billion georeferenced records covering the entire world over 30 years, coupled with the massive networks that connect all of the people, organizations, locations, themes, and emotions underlying those events, required not only solving unparalleled challenges to create the database, but also a "reimagining" of how we interact and think about societal-scale data.