Murrell Library Research Guides: Political Science: Congress

Best Starting Points

Voteview Congressional Voting Data
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.
Vital Statistics on Congress
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.
Database of Congressional Historical Statistics
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.

Congressional Documents & Reports

The best congressional documents starting place is ProQuest Congressional (see above)

Govinfo.gov
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.
Congress.gov
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+.
Congressional Record for the 43rd-114th Congresses: Parsed Speeches and Phrase Counts
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.
Congressional Globe (OCR text)
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.
House.Resource.Org
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).
Center for Legislative Archives (NARA)
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.

Partisanship and Ideology

Measuring Constituent Policy Preferences in Congress, State Legislatures, and Cities, 2000-2011 (Tausanovitch and Warshaw)
Measures the political liberalism/conservatism of states, congressional districts, state senate and assembly districts, and cities using responses to survey questions by 275,000 Americans who participated in the Annenberg National Election Study and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study from 2000 to 2011. Data is coded using district boundaries from both before and after the 2010 Census redistricting. Data in .csv format.
CQ.com Congressional Voting Scores
Daily updating of CQ's Presidential Support, Party Unity, and Voting Participation scores. This used to be only released annually. They also have scores for 2000-present on the site. Note: you must first log in to our CQ.com subscription, then click the link above to access. 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.
Presidential Support Scores
George C. Edwards, III (TAMU) calculates four indexes of presidential support based on roll call votes in Congress: 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.
CQ Almanac Presidential Support Tables
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+.

Legislative Data

Congressional Bills Project
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-present.
Govinfo Bulk Data: Bills
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.
Leg/Ex: Legislative Explorer
Interactive visualization for exploring patterns of lawmaking in Congress from the 93rd Congress (1973)- 114th Congress (2015-16). 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.
LegiScan National Legislative Datasets
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.
Measures of Significant Legislation, 1877-1994
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.
Policy Agendas Project
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, 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; 1945-2013.
ProPublica Bulk Data on Congressional Bills
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.
Resume of Congressional Activity
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.

Laws vs. Policies

"Laws are written and passed by the Legislative Branch, signed and implemented by the Executive Branch, and can be challenged through the Judiciary Branch. The President, as head of the Executive Branch, holds the power to direct the activities of Federal Agencies as long as instructions do not come in conflict with decisions of other branches.

The many types of legal instruments in the US are a product of this three branch system. The types of legal and policy instruments discussed on this website generally come from the Legislative and Executive Branches of government.

The most common types of legal instruments discussed are laws and regulations. Laws are passed by both branches of Congress and signed by the President. Laws establish requirements or prohibitions. Regulations are published by executive branch agencies to clarify their interpretation of a law and how a law will be implemented. Regulations also state requirements or prohibitions.

Some agencies also publish guidance or other policy statements, which further clarify how an agency understands and implements existing laws and regulations. Guidance and other policy statements describe suggested or recommended actions. Guidance and policy statements do not provide mandatory requirements unless they are incorporated into a regulation or mandated under terms and conditions of an agreement, such as a funding agreement."

from https://www.phe.gov/s3/law/Pages/default.aspx

Members, Committees, and Congressional Districts

Almanac of American Politics
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.
Biographical Directory of the U.S. 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.
Black Americans in Congress Historical Data
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.
Congressional Committee Membership
Datasets recording Congressional committee membership 1st–114th Congress (1789-2016) by Charles Stewart of MIT.
Congressional District Data, 1943-1998
"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.
Congressional District Demographic and Political Data, 1962-1994
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.
House Committee Funding Requests and Authorizations
Congressional Research Service report with tables on requested and authorized budgets by committee in the House since 1995.
House of Representatives Committee Assignment Request Data, 80th-103rd Congress
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.
House of Representatives Staff Levels in Member, Committee, Leadership, and Other Offices
CRS report showing staffing levels by committee in the House, 1977–present.
Politics in America
Biennial reference on with detailed bios on each Member and congressional district. Online back to 2006; in print at JK1010 .P64 (Firestone) back to 1982.
Roster of United States Congressional Officeholders and Biographical Characteristics of Members of the United States Congress, 1789-1996 (ICPSR 7803)
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."
Senate Staff Levels in Member, Committee, Leadership, and Other Offices
CRS report with tables showing staffing levels by committee in the Senate, 1977–present.
UC Davis Congressional Election Study
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.
United States Congressional District Shapefiles
Digital boundary definitions for every U.S. Congressional District in use between 1789 and 2012 provided by scholars at UCLA. Boundaries available as shapefiles or GeoJSON definitions. Includes extensive documentation of how boundaries for districts were constructed. For 2016 CD boundaries, see the United States Districts project.
Women in Congress Historical Tables
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.