Congressional Datasets: An Overview
By Josh McCrain
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1 Introduction
This is in no way an exhaustive list of available data for Congressional researchers. However, it does include the most common and widely-applicable data sources that are also in formats that are straightforward to work with. In the next section, I’ll begin combining multiple datasets, including those that do not share unique IDs, and create new measures for use in visualization and analyses.
I would love to include your data in this list, so please email me if and I will provide a link!
2 Comprehensive datasets
The datasets here are incredibly useful for building from as they already aggregate most of the covariates needed for typical work. I usually take these and add to them as needed.
- Historical Congressional Legislation and District Demographics - Legislator personal characterists, district information and demographics, legislative productivity (bills introduced, etc.)
- ICPSR unique ID. 1972-2014
- Volden and Wiseman Legislative Effectiveness Data - Member demographics including gender and race, state legislative experience, bill introductions, Legislative Effectiveness Scores, available for House and Senate.
- ICPSR unique ID. 1973-2018
3 Specific datasets:
These are the datasets that are useful for generating specific measures, such as voteshares, ideology, committee seniority, or bill introductions.
- Stewart and Woon: Congressional Committee Assignments - Member seniority, district, status during Congress t+1 (useful for resignations, defeats, etc.), party, committee assignment along with date of assignment, party rank.
- ICPSR unique ID. 1993-2017
- House and Senate Election Returns - House and Senate election returns from 1972-2018. Data are at the district-year level and state-seat-year level respectively.
- Provided by Carlos Algara
- OpenSecrets - Money in politics data including lobbying, donations, personal finances and much more.
- Availability depends on specific dataset.
- Voteview: Congressional Roll-Call Votes Database - DW-NOMINATE first and second dimension, Nokken-Poole ideology estimates, available for House and Senate.
- ICPSR, Bioguide ID. 1789-2019
- Political Institutions and Public Choice Roll-Call Database - Roll call votes for the House and Senate, 83rd Congress to today.
- Unit of analysis is individual vote.
- Congressional Bills Project - All bills and resolutions introduced in the House and Senate.
- ICPSR unique ID. Unit of analysis is individual bills, 93rd through 114th Congress.
- Distributive Politics and Legislator Ideology Replication Data - A good replication file with district level expenditures from the FAADs database.
- 1983-2010
- ProPublica House Office Expenditure Data - Cleaned versions of House office spending.
- Bioguide ID, 2009-2019
- ProPublica provides an array of other useful congressional data for download.
- American Ideology Project - MRP-generated estimates of ideology at various political geographies (congressional district, state legislative districts, states, cities and counties).
- Time coverage depends on geographic unit.