readDW_NOMINATE: Read the DW-NOMINATE data from their website.

Description

Read the DW-NOMINATE data from their website using read_csv, adding a Year = 2*congress+1787, which is the first year of each 2-year congress.

Usage

readDW_NOMINATE(file=
"https://voteview.com/static/data/out/members/HSall_members.csv", 
...)

Value

a tibble with columns

congress: number of the Congress starting with 1 in 1789.
chamber: character 'House', 'Senate' or 'President'
icpsr: number icpsr (number assigned by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)).
state_icpsr: number for the state used by ICPSR.
district_code: number between 0 and 99 indicating the district number within the state. This is 0 when (chamber %in% c('President', 'Senate') and occasionally when (chamber == 'House'). "At-large" members of the US House are coded 98 or 99. There were some before 1970. However, as of 2024-10-01, but there have been none since 1970.
state_abbrev: Either 'USA' or a 2-letter abbreviation for this state in the US.
party_code: positive numeric. As of 2024-09-30, over 80 percent of the members of Congress since 1857 have been either 100 (Democrats) or 200 (Republicans), and since 1943, less than 1 percent of the US Congress has not been either 100 or 200.
occupancy, last_means: numeric = 0:7 or `NA` with all `NA`s prior to 2017.
bioname: character name of politician, starting with "WASHINGTON, George".
bioguide_id: character The ID code used by the Biographical directory of the United States Congress, being the first character of the last name of the person followed by a 6-digit number or `NA` for US Presidents who were never members of Congress.
born, died: numeric 4-digit birth year or `NA`
nominate_dim1, nominate_dim2: numeric between -1 or 1 or `NA` described in Poole (2005).
nominate_log_likelihood: numeric negative number or `NA`
nominate_goe_mean_probabilty: numeric number between 0 and 1 or `NA`
nominate_number_of_votes: numeric positive number or `NA`
nominate_number_of_errors: numeric nonnegative number or `NA`
conditional: logical or `NA`
nokken_poole_dim1, nokken_poole_dim2: numeric between -1 or 1 or `NA` described by Nokken and Poole (2004).
Year: numeric First year of each 2-year computed from congress as (2*congress+1787).

Arguments

file: file argument passed to read_csv.
...: optional arguments for read_csv.

Author

Spencer Graves

Details

This is written to make it easy for users to download the DW-NOMINATE data from their website, assuming it should be easier to remember readDW_NOMINATE than

readr::read_csv("https://voteview.com/static/data/out/members/HSall_members.csv").

References

Voteview.com website.

Timothy P. Nokken and Keith T. Poole (2004) "Congressional Party Defection in American History." Legislative Studies Quarterly, 29:545-568,.

Keith T. Poole (2005) Spatial models of parliamentary voting (Cambridge U. Pr.).

Examples

Run this code

# Wrap in try(...) so it won't throw an error 
# if the Voteview website is not available. 

Nominate <- try(readDW_NOMINATE())

Run the code above in your browser using DataLab