Get data on congressional roll call votes from Voteview
Source:R/get_voteview_rollcall_votes.R
get_voteview_rollcall_votes.Rdget_voteview_rollcall_votes() returns a tibble with information on recorded
(roll call) votes in the House and Senate.
Arguments
- chamber
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.
- 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.
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 (2025). Voteview: Congressional Roll-Call Votes Database. https://voteview.com/
Examples
if (FALSE) { # interactive()
get_voteview_rollcall_votes()
# Get data for only one chamber
# NOTE: the President is included in all data
get_voteview_rollcall_votes(chamber = "house")
get_voteview_rollcall_votes(chamber = "senate")
}
# Get data for a specific Congress
get_voteview_rollcall_votes(congress = 100)
#> # A tibble: 1,738 × 18
#> congress chamber rollnumber date session clerk_rollnumber yea_count
#> <int> <fct> <int> <date> <int> <int> <int>
#> 1 100 House 1 1987-01-06 NA NA 254
#> 2 100 House 2 1987-01-06 NA NA 236
#> 3 100 House 3 1987-01-06 NA NA 175
#> 4 100 House 4 1987-01-06 NA NA 245
#> 5 100 House 5 1987-01-07 NA NA 416
#> 6 100 House 6 1987-01-08 NA NA 286
#> 7 100 House 7 1987-01-08 NA NA 406
#> 8 100 House 8 1987-01-08 NA NA 312
#> 9 100 House 9 1987-01-21 NA NA 319
#> 10 100 House 10 1987-01-21 NA NA 331
#> # ℹ 1,728 more rows
#> # ℹ 11 more variables: nay_count <int>, nominate_mid_1 <dbl>,
#> # nominate_mid_2 <dbl>, nominate_spread_1 <dbl>, nominate_spread_2 <dbl>,
#> # nominate_log_likelihood <dbl>, bill_number <chr>, vote_result <chr>,
#> # vote_desc <chr>, vote_question <chr>, dtl_desc <chr>
get_voteview_rollcall_votes(congress = current_congress())
#> # A tibble: 237 × 18
#> congress chamber rollnumber date session clerk_rollnumber yea_count
#> <int> <fct> <int> <date> <int> <int> <int>
#> 1 119 House 1 2025-01-03 1 2 218
#> 2 119 House 2 2025-01-03 1 3 216
#> 3 119 House 3 2025-01-03 1 4 209
#> 4 119 House 4 2025-01-03 1 5 215
#> 5 119 House 5 2025-01-07 1 6 264
#> 6 119 House 6 2025-01-09 1 7 243
#> 7 119 House 7 2025-01-13 1 8 407
#> 8 119 House 8 2025-01-13 1 9 405
#> 9 119 House 9 2025-01-14 1 10 426
#> 10 119 House 10 2025-01-14 1 11 208
#> # ℹ 227 more rows
#> # ℹ 11 more variables: nay_count <int>, nominate_mid_1 <dbl>,
#> # nominate_mid_2 <dbl>, nominate_spread_1 <dbl>, nominate_spread_2 <dbl>,
#> # nominate_log_likelihood <dbl>, bill_number <chr>, vote_result <chr>,
#> # vote_desc <chr>, vote_question <chr>, dtl_desc <chr>
if (FALSE) { # interactive()
# Get data for a set of Congresses
get_voteview_rollcall_votes(congress = 1:10)
}