C-QUERI: Congressional Questions, Exchanges, and Responses in Institutions Dataset
This work addresses a gap in political science by providing a dataset and framework for analyzing strategic discourse in congressional hearings, which is incremental but useful for researchers studying political behavior.
The researchers tackled the understudied strategic aspects of political questioning in congressional hearings by creating a large-scale dataset of question-answer pairs from the 108th to 117th Congress, and they found that party affiliation can be predicted from questions alone, revealing systematic differences in questioning strategies across parties.
Questions in political interviews and hearings serve strategic purposes beyond information gathering including advancing partisan narratives and shaping public perceptions. However, these strategic aspects remain understudied due to the lack of large-scale datasets for studying such discourse. Congressional hearings provide an especially rich and tractable site for studying political questioning: Interactions are structured by formal rules, witnesses are obliged to respond, and members with different political affiliations are guaranteed opportunities to ask questions, enabling comparisons of behaviors across the political spectrum. We develop a pipeline to extract question-answer pairs from unstructured hearing transcripts and construct a novel dataset of committee hearings from the 108th--117th Congress. Our analysis reveals systematic differences in questioning strategies across parties, by showing the party affiliation of questioners can be predicted from their questions alone. Our dataset and methods not only advance the study of congressional politics, but also provide a general framework for analyzing question-answering across interview-like settings.