American Politics

Provides real-time data on roll call votes, members' of Congress voting histories and their ideology (using NOMINATE scores, a way of spatially measuring ideology on a liberal-conservative economic axis and on a salient "issues of the day" axis), and party ideology scores for each individual Congress back to 1789. Also has a searchable interface and many visualization options. Data in csv and JSON formats; also accessible via the Rvoteview package.

Compiles information at the level of the individual legislator on biography, party membership, elections, and committee membership. Legislative data include roll call votes for each member, roll calls coded by issue, roll call text, presidential requests for legislative action and roll calls held in response. Data in delimited, STATA, SPSS, and SAS formats. 1789-1989.

Ornstein and Mann's classic print volume will now only be online. Tables cover member demographics, congressional elections, campaign finance, committees, staff and operating expenses, workload and productivity, action on the federal budget, polarization and voting alignments. Data in Excel format; dates vary, but generally 1950-present.

Project seeks to build a comprehensive and easily updated list of U.S. laws and their revision histories based on the Statutes at Large. It covers laws enacted from 1789 to 2022 containing nearly 50,000 statutes. Dataset codes the name of the law, its type, date of passage, Congress number, and legal identifiers. Note that the dataset does not include subtitles of named laws contained within a larger statute; e.g., the Bipartisan Trade Promotion Authority Act of 2002 is not listed in the dataset, because it was a subsection of PL 107-210, the Trade Act of 2002. OSF repository also includes code to update the set of laws to the present. See the article in Nature Scientific Data (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02758-z) for more details.

This dataset contains metadata for every bill introduced, including sponsors, cosponsors, committee actions, floor votes and a summary, along with the data of the last modification to the bill. Data in XML from 93rd Congress (1973) to present. ProPublica also provides an API with data on roll-call votes; Member biographical details, roles, votes, and co-sponsorships; bills; nominations; committees; and press releases by members of the House and Senate. Dates vary, generally 1995-present.

Project coding various documents and data according to a detailed topical classification scheme to enable an analysis of policymaking activities across time. Coded series include Congressional hearings, public laws, roll call votes, Congressional Quarterly articles, party platforms, budget authority, Presidential State of the Union speeches, Executive Orders, Supreme Court cases, a sample of New York Times articles, and Gallup’s Most Important Problem public opinion series. Data in .csv; generally 1947-present.

Provides information about more than 400,000 bills introduced in the U.S. Congress along with extensive information about each bill's progress and sponsor. The bills database uses Poole and Rosenthal's ICPSR member IDs to incorporate biographical and institutional position information about each bill's sponsor. Also classifies each bill's title according to the topic coding system of the Policy Agendas Project. Each bill is designated to be primarily about one major topic and one subtopic. Data in .tsv format; 1947-2020.

Bulk download of bills and legislative tracking information for Congress and the 50 states. Requires free registration. Downloads in JSON, XML, and CSV. Generally, late 2000s-present.

In the spirit of Mayhew's work, identifies more than 1500 pieces of significant legislation from the first Congress through 2010. Also includes similar data from Stathis's Landmark Legislation book for comparison.

Dataset estimating the legislative significance of all enacted public laws from 1877-1994 (more than 37,000). Significance is determined by using the ratings of both contemporaneous and retrospective sources. Each law includes Congress number and session, date of passage, public law number, bill number, originating committee, description, and page length. See Clinton and Lapinski (2006). “Measuring Legislative Accomplishment, 1877-1994,” American Journal of Political Science 50(1):232-49.

Updates Mayhew's classic Divided We Govern book with lists of important legislative laws or enactments from 1947-2022. (Not really in a data format.)

Roll call votes from the House (83rd Congress/1953-present) and Senate (91st Congress/1969-present) utilizing an extensive coding for procedural vote type, party unity, Southern/Northern coalitions, presidential position. Also includes Policy Agenda codes.

Data from the Center for Effective Lawmaking scoring each member of the House and Senate on a range of legislative effectiveness scores from 1973-present. Data in Excel or Stata.

Codes 52,648 congressional committee hearings and 755,540 witnesses spanning 1961–2016. Data codes for 18 different witness types (e.g., bureaucrat, corporation, membership association, etc.), year, chamber, committee, hearing title, Policy Agendas Project major topic codes, and more (witness and organization names are not included). See Ban, Pamela, Ju Yeon Park, and Hye Young You. "How are politicians informed? Witnesses and information provision in congress. American Political Science Review 117, no. 1 (2023): 122-139 for more details.

Official GPO bulk data repository for Congressional bill text and status from the 113th Congress (2013-2014) to present. Data can be retrieved in either XML or JSON formats.

Nonprofit dedicated to tracking legislation and legislators in the US. Pulls in bills and resolution data and text from THOMAS and GPO (103rd Congress/1993-present; selected historical data), provides voting records of representatives and senators back to 1789 (THOMAS for recent and VOTEVIEW data for older votes), and biographical (1789-present) and committee data (93rd Congress/1973-present) from various sources.

Provides 1-2 page summary statistics of the legislative activity of each Congress back to the 80th (1947-48). Each contains things like how many measures were introduced, reported, passed, and enacted into law; how many votes and which kinds; and how many nominations were confirmed or unconfirmed.

Interactive visualization for exploring patterns of lawmaking in Congress from the 93rd Congress (1973)- 113th Congress (2013-14). Includes information about the legislative histories, topics and sponsors of more than 250,000 bills and resolutions. Can be filtered by individual member, by party, by topic, and more. Bulk data downloads available.

Provides estimates of the ideology (political liberalism/conservatism) of states, congressional districts, state legislative districts, counties, cities, townships, school districts, and Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs) across three time periods: 2006-2011, 2012-2016, 2017-2021. Using responses to survey questions by more than 1 million Americans from the Cooperative Election Studies and the UCLA/Nationscape Surveys, Warshaw and Tausanovitch estimate individual ideology ideal points and aggregate those to different geographies using an MRP model. First, each individual’s policy preferences are estimated as a function of the individual's demographics (race, gender, and education) and geographic location. Then, estimates for each respondent demographic-geographic type are weighted by the proportion of each group in the actual populations and summed. The datasets also include estimates of presidential vote for each geography. Data in tab delimited format.

Daily updating of CQ's Presidential Support, Party Unity, and Voting Participation scores. They also have scores for 2000-present on the site. Note: From off-campus, you'll need to log in to our CQ.com subscription first.

For a more-data ready version (1945-current with typically a 1-2 year lag), use the CQ Congress collection. At the bottom, select the type of score (presidential support, party unity, etc.) in the “Score Category” box, select a Congressional session (and year if you want), then click “Find Scores”. The list that comes up can be downloaded to Excel/csv by clicking on “Export data” at the upper right.

Presidential support scores based on Poole and Rosenthal's Voteview roll call data using a different method of inferring the president's position. House 1792-present; Senate 1955-present. Data in csv.

George C. Edwards, III (TAMU) calculated four indexes of presidential support based on roll call votes in Congress using CQ Almanac coding of the president's position: overall support, nonunanimous support, single-issue vote support, and CQ Key Vote support. Support scores by member of Congress as well as yearly averages. Data in .txt and Excel formats; 1953-2015.

Presidential Support Tables listed yearly in the CQ Almanac. Lists all the roll calls on which the president took a stand and how members of Congress voted relative to his position. PDF tables and analysis; 1953+. For trend tables for presidential victories by chamber and Congressional support by party, 1954-2014, see Tables 6-7 and 6-8 in Vital Statistics on American Politics.

Ratings scorecards of every MC from 10 prominent interest groups (ACLU, AFL-CIO, Chamber of Commerce, etc.). Data can be exported to Excel.

PVS collects interest group ratings and and endorsements by national and state groups across the ideological spectrum for Members of Congress and candidates for election. Browse by issue state/national and/or issue area.

Datasets of all members of Congress, by session, with key info: chamber, ICPSR member ID, ICPSR state code, district code, ICPSR party code, Congressional bioguide ID, birth year, death year, as well as NOMINATE ideology score. Select "Member Ideology" file as Data Type to download to .csv.

Contains "variables describing congressional service and selected biographical characteristics for each person who has served in the United States Congress" through the 104th Congress. The congressional service variables "include political party affiliation, district, state and region represented, and exact and cumulative dates of service in each Congress and each chamber, as well as total congressional service. The biographical variables cover state and region of birth, education, military service, occupation, other political offices held, relatives who also have held congressional office, reason for leaving each Congress, and occupation and political offices held subsequent to service in Congress."

Biographical directory of all members of Congress from 1774 to present. Can search by name, position, state, party, year, or Congress number. For bulk download of data, see Govtrack's github page. 1774-present.

Directory information on Members of Congress (2005-present; 1 year lag) as well as federal executives (2014-present; 1 year lag). Includes committee assignments, biographical information, staff, and more from KnowWho. Each year is a zipped excel file with multiple tables linked by unique person IDs.

"Includes detailed biographical information about the members of the 106th through 110th Congresses (1999-2008) compiled from online almanacs and other sources. The project's principal aim was to compile complete occupational histories for each member, but the dataset also includes information about a wide range of characteristics including race, gender, religion, education, and family of origin. The dataset also includes a wide range of constituency characteristics and FEC donation data as well as roll-call scores and bill introduction data compiled by others." Data in Stata.

See the links on the Money in Politics page for data on MCs' personal finances.

District expert survey of the 2006 and 2010 congressional elections, conducted in a random sample of U.S. House districts. National convention delegates and state legislators in both political parties were surveyed as expert informants and were asked to place each candidate running in their district on a liberal-conservative scale and on several issue items; to rate each candidate on items designed to assess skills, traits, and attributes as candidates and as office holders; and to report on various aspects of the tone, emphasis, and conduct of the House campaign in their district. Data from individual experts are available, as are data on various candidate- and district-level indicators constructed from the informant responses.

Compiled by the House Clerk, various tables about women in Congress. Includes a full list of all female representatives and senators by Congress and by state; committee assignments (by committee); female committee chairs; women of color; and more. 1917-present.

Compiled by the House Clerk, various tables about Black Americans in Congress. Includes a full list of all Black Representatives and Senators by Congress and by state; committee assignments (by committee); committee chairs; Black Caucus leaders, and more. 1870-present.

Data on more than 300 scandals involving sitting members of Congress. Each scandal is defined as being a sex, financial, political, or other type of scandal. Each record also codes the scandal “break date” (the first instance of the scandal being reported in a news source) and the scandal salience (number of times the scandal was mentioned in the New York Times in the thirty days following the break date). Data in .csv.

Full rosters, including staffers, of House, Senate, and Joint committees and subcommittees from the 106th Congress (1999-2000) to present.

Profiles for each Congressional committee, with links to the current website, membership lists, hearings, and documents.

Directory information on Members of Congress (2005-present; 1 year lag) as well as federal executives (2014-present; 1 year lag). Includes committee assignments, biographical information, staff, and more from KnowWho. Each year is a zipped excel file with multiple tables linked by unique person IDs.

Datasets recording Congressional committee membership 1st–115th Congress (1789-2017) by Charles Stewart of MIT. Updates through 117th Congress (through 2022) at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/congdata.

Congress.gov provides this useful table showing the evolution of names of active and terminated standing and joint committees in the House and Senate from inception. It also includes active and terminated select, special, and other committees and panels from the early 1970s forward.

Congressional Research Service report with tables on requested and authorized budgets by committee in the House since 1995.

CRS report showing staffing levels by committee in the House, 1977–present.

CRS report with tables showing staffing levels by committee in the Senate, 1977–present.

Data on the committee preferences of 1,163 first term members (655 Democrats, 452 Republicans) and committee transfer requests made by 1,317 incumbents (711 Democrats, 662 Republicans), 1947–1995.

Codes 52,648 congressional committee hearings and 755,540 witnesses spanning 1961–2016. Data codes for 18 different witness types (e.g., bureaucrat, corporation, membership association, etc.), year, chamber, committee, hearing title, Policy Agendas Project major topic codes, and more (witness and organization names are not included). See Ban, Pamela, Ju Yeon Park, and Hye Young You. "How are politicians informed? Witnesses and information provision in congress. American Political Science Review 117, no. 1 (2023): 122-139 for more details.

Full text of United States Congressional Hearings (both House and Senate) 1824-2020 as extracted by ProQuest from its various Congressional hearings collections and delivered in bulk as XML files. Pre-processing completed by Politics Librarian, Jeremy Darrington, to extract individual hearing files, rename by hearing ID, and group into folders by decade. Some restrictions on use; see the included Terms of Use file.

Various demographic data at state and CD for recent years. In particular, includes helpful explanations of how different electoral geographies relate to each other with sheets mapping those relationships. Data in Google sheets.

"The data set includes a wide range of economic, social and geographic information for every U.S. congressional district. The variables range from such basic information as size of each district (in square miles), the population, and the number unemployed (at the time of each census) to much more specialized information like the number of beds in VA hospitals in the district or whether the district is coastal." Compiled by Scott Adler. Data available in .csv for each Congress.

Contains a wide range of demographic and political variables for congressional districts of the 87th-104th Congresses. Used in David Lublin's book, The paradox of representation: racial gerrymandering and minority interests in Congress. Data in .csv and tabular format.

This site provides digital boundary definitions for every U.S. Congressional District in use between 1789 and 2012. Produced by Jeffrey Lewis at UCLA. Boundaries are available as shapefiles or GeoJSON definitions. Includes extensive documentation of how boundaries for districts were constructed. These have been incorporated into the GeoReferenced Electoral Districts (GRED) dataset, which merges them with CLEA constituencies for the US. They have also been utilized in the Spatiotemporal Congressional District Data project by Levi Wolf creating a fully georeferenced dataset of election results and district boundaries (see the write-up in Nature). For CD boundaries 2016-present, see the United States Districts project.

"Provides crosswalks that allow researchers i) to harmonize U.S. county boundaries over time across Census decades and ii) to generate congressional district level variables from county-level data. The crosswalks include an area-based approach as in Hornbeck (2010), as well as the new population-based methods from Ferrara, Testa, and Zhou (2021), which are based on granular sub-county population information." Also provides slides demonstrating the utility of the crosswalks. The crosswalks can be used for a simple mapping of congressional districts to counties based on Census apportionment cycles.

Official publication site of the Government Publishing Office. In addition to Congressional documents, this site houses official publications from across the federal government. Also includes some bulk material under the Developers tab.

The Library of Congress's official site for current legislative information. Provides the full text of House and Senate bills, bill summary and status reports, public laws, roll call votes, the Congressional Record, Congressional committee reports, presidential nominations, and treaty documents. Replaced the former THOMAS system. 93rd Congress/1973+.

Contains text from the bound and daily editions of the United States Congressional Record that has been OCR-ed and parsed into speeches and bigrams with speaker and session metadata. Covers the 43rd to 114th Congress (1873-2017). Also includes a list of phrases manually classified into topics.

OCR text of the Congressional Globe (1833-1873, predecessor of the Congressional Record) processed by Mark Phillips, University of North Texas Libraries, using the image files from the Library of Congress's Century of Lawmaking collection. No additional post-processing has been done and the OCR is of varying quality. 1 tar file; 112 volumes, 104,615 pages of OCR text.

CLA preserves and makes available to researchers the historical records of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Provides finding aids to House and Senate collections as well as additional resources.

Bulk download of House of Representatives Committee Hearing videos and transcripts. Most are from the Oversight Committee, but other committees are also represented. 100th-112th Congresses (1987-2012).

Major news source covering Congress, U.S. politics, and policy debates.

Major news sources covering Congress and Capitol Hill (also included in our CQ.com subscription, see above). You can also browse archived issues.

A weekly news magazine featuring in-depth reporting on public policy, politics, congressional legislation, and elections extending back to 1983, including: a complete wrap-up of news on Congress, the status of bills in play, behind-the-scenes maneuvering, committee and floor activity, debates, and all roll-call votes.

Issued biennially, the Almanac provides in-depth analysis and comprehensive profiles of every congressional district, state, governor and member of Congress. Previous years are in print at JK1012 .A44 (Firestone) back to 1972.

Biennial reference on with detailed bios on each Member and congressional district. Ceased in 2018. Online 2000-2018; in print at JK1010 .P64 (Firestone) 1982-2014.

This authoritative and exhaustive 2 volume reference covers the history and development of Congress as an institution (7th ed., 2012).

A new prototype portal that is bringing together archives of Members of Congress from across the U.S. The personal papers of MCs belong to them and are thus typically scattered across institutions in their home states. This project aims to bring significant collections together making Congressional archival research easier. Currently, includes some collections from West Virginia University Libraries, the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics, and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education.