In today's world, many political agendas, statements, feuds and announcements go out via Twitter or Facebook. These are becoming increasingly critical not just to the policies put forth by administrations and Congress, but also to legal researchers and political scientists. How do you track down how views have evolved over time and how people on both sides of the aisle have reacted to events ranging from hurricanes to gun control?

An amazing database that helps you discover these tweets, posts and releases is Voxgov. With Voxgov, researchers can quickly analyze reactions to world events, compare reactions from politicians, search for what is trending and find out what a particular politician talks about on social media. For example, a researcher can quickly locate President Trump's tweets and read them through chronologically or by topic. Even if a tweet or post is deleted, Voxgov still captures and archives it for posterity.

Voxgov also allows you to search across platforms for how politicians are reacting to a topic, how often that topic has been posted over time and much more.

Not only does Voxgov cover politician's social media accounts, it also collects press releases from governmental agencies, legislation announcements, regulatory documents and more. It really is a very powerful tool for locating news and for following what is happening now and why it is happening.

The advanced search tool allows you to narrow down to a very specific area of results as well, which is critical for such a gigantic and constantly growing database. If you wanted, you could narrow your search down to tweets by African-american females from Alabama with a Graduate degree between the ages of 45-64 who is a member of the Democratic party and is Protestant. You will get 18 results back that fit that very narrow criteria. Utilizing an advanced search in such a powerful database is very important in a large database, and Voxgov gives you a great tool for finding those specific tweets.

Voxgov is becoming an indispensable tool for legislative researchers, news wonks, political scientists or really just any law student who wants to know what their elected representative is talking about. If you have any questions about the use of Voxgov, please contact a Law Librarian. Happy Voxing!

Submitted by Kristopher Turner on October 17, 2017

This article appears in the categories: Law Library