Get data on members of Congress from Voteview
Source:R/get_voteview_members.R
get_voteview_members.Rdget_voteview_members() returns a tibble of data on members of Congress,
sourced from Voteview. Members in the data include
Senators, Representatives, and Presidents. Each row is one member in one
Congress (i.e., each member is listed once for every two years in office).
Arguments
- chamber
(Optional) Which chamber to get data for. Options are:
"all","congress","hs": Both House and Senate data (the default)."house","h","hr": House data only."senate","s","sen": Senate data only.
These options are case-insensitive. If you explicitly pass a different value, it will default to "all" with a warning.
Note that presidents are included in all datasets. Therefore, reading both
"house"and"senate"data will duplicate data on the presidents. The recommended way to get all data is to use the default argument,"all".- congress
(Optional) A whole number (to get data for a single Congress), or a numeric vector (to get data for a set of congresses).
If not provided, will retrieve data for all Congresses by default. If specified, Congress numbers cannot be greater than the
current_congress()(i.e., you cannot try to get future data).- local_path
(Optional) A file path for reading from a local file. If no
local_pathis specified, will read data from the Voteview website.
Value
A tibble.
The tibble includes data on the member's office, party, and ideology. See Voteview for descriptions of specific columns.
Details
See the Voteview website for more information on their data.
Please cite this dataset as:
Lewis, Jeffrey B., Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, Adam Boche, Aaron Rudkin, and Luke Sonnet (2026). Voteview: Congressional Roll-Call Votes Database. https://voteview.com/
Parallel downloads with mirai
If you have installed the packages mirai and carrier, then the Voteview functions can download Voteview data from multiple Congresses in parallel.
To download Voteview data in parallel, use mirai::daemons() to create
parallel processes. If you are downloading Voteview data for many
Congresses, this can provide a significant speed-up.
See vignette("parallel-downloads") for full usage details.
Examples
if (FALSE) { # interactive() && !is.null(curl::nslookup("voteview.com", error = FALSE))
get_voteview_members()
# Get data for only one chamber
# NOTE: the President is included in all data
get_voteview_members(chamber = "house")
get_voteview_members(chamber = "senate")
}
# Get data for a specific Congress
get_voteview_members(congress = 100)
#> # A tibble: 543 × 22
#> congress chamber icpsr state_icpsr district_code state_abbrev party_code
#> <int> <fct> <int> <int> <int> <fct> <int>
#> 1 100 President 99907 99 0 USA 200
#> 2 100 House 10717 41 2 AL 200
#> 3 100 House 11000 41 4 AL 100
#> 4 100 House 11037 41 3 AL 100
#> 5 100 House 14419 41 5 AL 100
#> 6 100 House 15022 41 6 AL 100
#> 7 100 House 15090 41 1 AL 200
#> 8 100 House 15416 41 7 AL 100
#> 9 100 House 14066 81 1 AK 200
#> 10 100 House 10566 61 2 AZ 100
#> # ℹ 533 more rows
#> # ℹ 15 more variables: occupancy <int>, last_means <int>, bioname <chr>,
#> # bioguide_id <chr>, born <int>, died <int>, nominate_dim1 <dbl>,
#> # nominate_dim2 <dbl>, nominate_log_likelihood <dbl>,
#> # nominate_geo_mean_probability <dbl>, nominate_number_of_votes <int>,
#> # nominate_number_of_errors <int>, conditional <lgl>,
#> # nokken_poole_dim1 <dbl>, nokken_poole_dim2 <dbl>
get_voteview_members(congress = current_congress())
#> # A tibble: 555 × 22
#> congress chamber icpsr state_icpsr district_code state_abbrev party_code
#> <int> <fct> <int> <int> <int> <fct> <int>
#> 1 119 President 99912 99 0 USA 200
#> 2 119 House 20301 41 3 AL 200
#> 3 119 House 21102 41 7 AL 100
#> 4 119 House 21500 41 6 AL 200
#> 5 119 House 22140 41 1 AL 200
#> 6 119 House 22366 41 5 AL 200
#> 7 119 House 22515 41 2 AL 100
#> 8 119 House 29701 41 4 AL 200
#> 9 119 House 22503 81 1 AK 200
#> 10 119 House 21995 93 0 NA 200
#> # ℹ 545 more rows
#> # ℹ 15 more variables: occupancy <int>, last_means <int>, bioname <chr>,
#> # bioguide_id <chr>, born <int>, died <int>, nominate_dim1 <dbl>,
#> # nominate_dim2 <dbl>, nominate_log_likelihood <dbl>,
#> # nominate_geo_mean_probability <dbl>, nominate_number_of_votes <int>,
#> # nominate_number_of_errors <int>, conditional <lgl>,
#> # nokken_poole_dim1 <dbl>, nokken_poole_dim2 <dbl>
if (FALSE) { # interactive() && !is.null(curl::nslookup("voteview.com", error = FALSE))
# Get data for a set of Congresses
get_voteview_members(congress = 1:10)
}