The Center on Regional Politics (CORP) has three affiliated centers housed within Temple University’s College of Liberal Arts. The Institute for Public Affairs houses both the Center on Regional Politics and the Pennsylvania Policy Database Project.
Temple University’s Institute for Public Affairs conducts, supports, and disseminates interdisciplinary research to inform and improve public policy, focusing particularly on Philadelphia, the greater metropolitan area, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
IPA research targets important social, economic, and political problems, and public policies that address them. IPA seeks to foster collaboration and intellectual exchange across disciplines. IPA aims to forge connections among students, scholars, policymakers, and citizens, to encourage research informed by the concerns of those who decide public policy and to facilitate public policies informed by research.
Institute for Survey Research
Founded in 1967, Temple University Institute for Survey Research is one of the oldest and most prestigious academic survey research centers in the U.S., with more than 40 years of experience conducting national, state, and local surveys, statistical research, focus group research, needs assessments, and program evaluations.
They collaborate with faculty and other researchers around the country on surveys and evaluations across a broad range of fields, topics and populations.
Pennsylvania Policy Database Project
The Pennsylvania Policy Database Project is a free, online resource that provides access to more than 160,000 state and news media records and enables users to trace and analyze with a few mouse clicks the history of public policy in the Commonwealth since 1979. Designed for easy use by educators, students, researchers, policy makers, news reporters, and the general public, it is the first comprehensive state policy database of its kind.
The project was built by Temple University and five other universities with the support and cooperation of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. Also participating were Pennsylvania State University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania State University Harrisburg, and the University of Pennsylvania.
The Pennsylvania project is modeled on the national Policy Agendas database, which allows users to track and analyze federal policy since 1946. Created by political scientists Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones and funded by the National Science Foundation, the national project is housed at the University of Texas. Similar databases are under construction in a dozen foreign countries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.