filibustr (version 0.5.0)

get_voteview_parties: Get data on congressional parties from Voteview

Description

get_voteview_parties() returns a tibble with information on the parties (aka caucuses) in each Congress. The party information includes a party's ICPSR code, number of members, and DW-NOMINATE scores.

The parties of the President, Senate, and House are listed in the data. Each row is one party in one chamber for each Congress (i.e., each party is listed once for every two years).

Usage

get_voteview_parties(chamber = "all", congress = NULL, local_path = NULL)

Value

A tibble.

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_path is specified, will read data from the Voteview website.

Parallel downloads with <a href="https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=mirai"><span class="pkg">mirai</span></a>

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.

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() && !is.null(curl::nslookup("voteview.com", error = FALSE))
get_voteview_parties()

# get parties for only one chamber
# NOTE: the President is included in all data
get_voteview_parties(chamber = "house")
get_voteview_parties(chamber = "senate")
}
# get parties for a specific Congress
get_voteview_parties(congress = 100)
get_voteview_parties(congress = current_congress())
if (FALSE) { # interactive() && !is.null(curl::nslookup("voteview.com", error = FALSE))
# get parties for a set of Congresses
get_voteview_parties(congress = 1:10)
}