Some of the most interesting work currently being done on Congress is that which adopts a historical perspective. Historical works on Congress have tremendous potential to advance our understanding of legislative institutions and American politics in general. Variation in legislative institutions and historical context can be exploited to test hypotheses that have previously only been applied to the contemporary Congress. Part of the innovativeness of the historical Congress research program is the application of “modern” methods (i.e., formal theory and statistical modeling) to study events and behavior that occurred long ago. Yet simply porting such methods to earlier time periods has pitfalls which can seriously dilute the potential that the historical Congress research program has to offer.

The advantages of formal modeling and quantitative analysis—i.e., abstraction, parsimony, systemization—can become disadvantages when these approaches are employed for historical analysis. These methods threaten to disregard the richness of history and ignore certain features of periodicity, context, and path dependency that are central to more traditional historical studies. A key puzzle facing the historical Congress research program is how to apply modern methods in a way that is sensitive to the nuances of historical analysis.

We propose to initiate a series of conferences where we bring together scholars working in the historical Congress research program to address these concerns about methodology. By bringing together scholars working in this area, as well as bringing in scholars not directly involved in the program but who might have much to contribute (e.g., methodologists, game theorists, economic historians), we hope to further the goals of the project and help it to fully realize its potential.