Third-year UC Santa Barbara political science student Aviva Varma has done more than talk the talk to drive political change. She’s walked the walk – literally. In high school, she canvassed door-to-door and organized outreach events for Florida House Representative Anna Eskamani. As a volunteer, she climbed her way up the ranks of the Florida Democratic Party, earning a promotion from Fellow to Phone Hub Director within a few months. 

 

Now, Varma has turned her eager eyes to a new issue: political literacy. Armed with a passion for effecting societal change, Varma is striving to increase political literacy through her work in UCSB’s American Presidency Project (APP), a comprehensive database of all existing presidential documents. For her research, she meticulously combs through pages of assigned documents to confirm they refer to the correct statutes, then she uploads them to their corresponding website portals.

 

Initially conceived in 1999 as a class resource for UCSB political science students, APP currently boasts over 5 million annual users internationally, with around 40% of the users under age 34. The White House has repeatedly cited the UCSB-hosted database, which first appeared in a 2016 press briefing. Co-directors John Woolley, a political science professor at UCSB, and Gerhard Peters, a political science professor at Citrus College in Glendora, California, aspire to make it the go-to interface for historical presidential documents - and they’re recruiting ambitious students like Varma to accomplish this.

 

Varma recently sat down for an interview to outline how her research for the American Presidency Project can promote political literacy and a deeper understanding of history for the American public. 

 

 

It’s super important to preserve our history. The purpose of the project is to make records of history and prevent the loss of the past. 

 

We have a bunch of different events and acts that have been passed throughout history. Our job is to make sure that our readers can access the actual legal acts and statutes. We make sure that they're all stored in a database, they're all accessible, and that all the links are working. Every single act has to be recorded and maintained.

 

Anyone can access it: scholars, historians, students. It's usually people that are curious about historical acts that have been passed in the US, because we keep track of every single historical event that ever occurred. We can look at presidential actions and we can see what worked, and what didn’t work. Then we can think about how we should handle things in the future if similar situations occur.

 

 

A lot of the acts historically passed a lot more quickly, and with much less conflict, than acts that are being passed right now. That’s due to increasing polarization. And I knew that, but it’s different to see the amount of work that presidents were able to get done in their tenure, back in the 18th and the 19th century, compared to now. 

 

With the amount of misinformation that we have today, it’s imperative that people know the real truth – and that they have a source where they can find that. The fact that this database is free, accessible, and so expansive really facilitates this. 

 

I hope that it continues to expand. The purpose of it is to educate people and keep them informed. And so the wider audience that we can get, the better it is for America, and for the political literacy of the country.