get_voteview_members: Get data on members of Congress from Voteview

In filibustr: Data Utilities for Congressional Research

Get data on members of Congress from Voteview

Description

get_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).

Usage

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

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.

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/

Value

A tibble.

The tibble includes data on the member's office, party, and ideology. See Voteview for descriptions of specific columns.

Examples

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)
get_voteview_members(congress = current_congress())


# Get data for a set of Congresses
get_voteview_members(congress = 1:10)

filibustr documentation built on April 4, 2025, 3:43 a.m.